Fairfax, Detroit, Jamestown, Kansas City, Dallas, Livonia, and finally Ann Arbor. Ellen had been born in Fairfax; Jane and Megan, in Detroit. The three girls were barely school age when the Barrett family moved to Jamestown, a small country town in upper New York where there had been a hundred things for a child to do. Ellen kept her eyes closed until finally she could hear their voices….
“Ellen, look what I found!” A towheaded Jane, barely four years old, came bounding up the hillside, her small hands cupping the body of a bumpy, brown toad.
“Let’s find him a box.” Ellen motioned for Jane to follow and the two girls ran as fast as they could back to the house. Gasping for breath, Ellen ran inside and came back with a dilapidated cardboard container.
“Should we put grass in it to keep him happy?” Jane’s innocent blue eyes gazed admirably at her older sister.
“Okay.” Ellen helped Jane lower the toad into the box and grabbed fistfuls of grass. “I know he’s your toad, Jane. But let’s say we’re both his parents.”
“All right. That way he’ll have two people who love him.”
“Hey, what do you girls have there?” The voice was her father’s. Clear, strong, vibrantly alive. He walked toward them, his whole face smiling.
“A toad!” they shouted in unison.
Their father, a systems analyst and one of the most brilliant men to enter the booming new frontier of computers, stooped down and patted the homely creature.
“A fine toad, I might add.” He glanced around. “What if we find another one? So that this one will have a friend.”
Jane wrinkled her small nose. “No, Daddy. I think one’s enough.”
He sat back on the grass and looked at Jane thoughtfully. “Well, now, you and Ellen are sisters, but you’re friends, too, right?”
Jane smiled at her big sister. “Right.”
“Think how you’d feel if someone put you in a box and took you away from Ellen.”
Jane’s face fell and she reached for Ellen’s hand. “I would be sad, Daddy.”
“That’s how your toad feels.” He stood up and swung Ellen onto his shoulders, taking Jane’s hand in his. “Come on, now. Let’s go find ourselves another toad so that the little fellow won’t be so lonely.”
The voices grew dim and Ellen opened her eyes slowly, staring vacantly into the sky, wishing she could remember whether they had ever found another toad. Instead, a different scene began taking shape.
Kansas City, late-afternoon. Their mother was seven months pregnant with Amy and had taken Ellen, Jane, and Megan outside their rented townhouse to wait for their father’s return from work. Dark clouds filled the sky and there was lightning in the distance. It was tornado season, and the weather bureau had warned that conditions were right for a twister.
Blissfully unaware of the weather, the girls giggled and sang silly songs, watching intently until finally they saw the green Ford sedan round the corner.
“Daddy!” Their delighted squeals rang out, and they jumped up and down as their father parked the car and climbed out. Dressed in a suit and tie, he bounded toward them, a blond, six-foot-two, former football player with bulky shoulders and arms of steel. He swept each of the three girls into his arms, one at a time, tossing them into the air and making them laugh so hard they could barely breathe.
“I have an idea!” He grinned at his wife and leaned down to kiss her.
She smiled. “That’s what I love about you, John.”
“What’s that?” He traced a finger along her cheek and stooped to tousle Jane’s hair.
“Never a dull moment. I’m married to the chief memory maker in all of Missouri.”
“Tell us, Daddy. Please! Tell us.” The girls jumped up and down, tugging on their father’s coat sleeves and waiting to hear his plan for the afternoon.
“Let’s take a drive.” He pointed toward the menacing storm clouds. “Maybe we can get a better view of the storm.”
Ellen’s face grew troubled. “Daddy, is it safe?”
She was always the worried one, doubting whether the car was working properly and making sure the doors were locked. She was especially nervous about storms, even as a six-year-old. Her father looked sympathetically at her and tousled her hair.
“Of course it’s safe. I wouldn’t do anything that might hurt my girls.”
“It hurts to move away from our friends, Daddy,” Ellen said then.
Her father frowned and lowered himself to his oldest daughter’s level. “I know that, honey. It hurts me, too. But right now we don’t have any choice.”
“Will we move again?”
“Probably. But wherever we go we’ll be together and we’ll always have each other.”
Her father’s words rang in Ellen’s mind, and she glanced out the window once more. What he’d said was true. Ellen and her sisters and mother had grown to depend on each other because they were never sure of anything except the family to which they belonged.
Another memory began taking shape, and Ellen could see herself holding a bulky, oversized chalkboard. There was something scribbled on it, and she was shouting at cars that drove by.
“Park here! One dollar. Park here!”
The image was clear now. The town was Ann Arbor, where the Barretts had lived just eight houses away from the University of Michigan football stadium. Each Saturday when there was a home game, fans would cruise up and down the neighboring streets looking for a place to park.
Nearly everyone on Keech Street parked cars in their driveways and even on their front lawns. Ellen was eight and all week she looked forward to the frenzied excitement of football Saturdays. She would wave the chalkboard to gain the attention of passing motorists. Park here, $1, the sign read. Anxious fans would pull into the yard, and her father would collect the money.
At halftime the family would walk toward the bright, yellow gates of the stadium, and her father would wink at the ticket taker.
“Residents get in free at halftime, right?”
The attendant would smile, size up the trail of children that tagged behind the man, and wave the group inside. They would sit as close as they could to the Michigan Wolverine marching band.
By then Amy was nearly two years old and the family finally included a boy, Aaron Randall Barrett. Even when the weather grew cold and snow covered the ground, their father would carry his infant son to the games, snuggling him tightly beneath his heavy brown wool coat. Their mother usually stayed home to work on dinner and get the house ready for weekend company.
“You’re the littlest Wolverine of all,” their father would say to the infant Aaron once they were settled into stadium seats. Ellen remembered watching with her sisters as their father tickled and cooed at their only brother. “One day you’ll be a big Wolverine, Aaron, and Daddy will come watch you play football every Saturday.”
“I’m going to be a Wolverine, too, Daddy,” Ellen would say and her father would pull her close.
“That’s my girl, Ellen. You can be whatever you want.”
When Michigan scored a touchdown, as the team often did, the band would erupt into the familiar fight song and everyone in the Barrett family old enough to talk would sing along.
“Hail to the victors valiant, hail to the conquering heroes, hail, hail, to Michigan…” Even little Amy knew to raise her right fist whenever the word hail was sung.
Ellen sighed as the memories blended in her mind. Dozens of Michigan games. Every Saturday of the football season for two years.
The plane moved along effortlessly as Ellen tried to capture a glimpse of her father and savor it. She could see him sitting in Michigan Stadium, eyes wide with excitement, cheeks red from the chilly air, cheering the Wolverines to victory. How he loved Michigan football.
Twelve years later, when Ellen was accepted into the university’s journalism program, no one was more thrilled than her father. Aaron had not pursued football beyond his sophomore year in high school. But Ellen knew she had been her Dad’s kind
red spirit, a child who shared the desires of his heart.
The plane rumbled as it passed through turbulent air, and suddenly Ellen remembered the football season just ten months before her father’s death. Michigan had played Notre Dame in a spectacular contest. She’d known he would be watching the game and had called him from Miami during the third quarter to see if he’d caught one particularly good play.
But he was asleep. Daddy, what’s happening to you? Ellen had wondered at the time.
“Your father’s been so tired lately; Ellen,” her mom explained when she got on the line. “His health really isn’t that good. I’m sure he’ll call you later.”
Ellen shook off the image of her father sleeping through a Michigan football game. She refused to remember him that way and she drifted back once more to her childhood.
She and her siblings had thrived in Ann Arbor. Her dad had accepted a position with Parsons Engineering, and, thankfully, relocating was not part of the job description. Their family finally had a reason to develop roots and they did so in a matter of months.
With so many children under one roof, almost anything they did became an event to remember. In the winter they ice-skated at Almondinger Park and built snowmen families in the front yard. When summer came they picked blueberries at Hanson’s Farm and swam at Half Moon Lake. Best of all was autumn and football Saturdays.
Their mother would easily go along with almost anything their dad wanted to do. But inevitably he was the parent who made things happen. He planned picnics at the local lakes, pajama parties at the drive-in theater, and birthday bashes for each of his children every year.
The family was fiercely Catholic, and their father believed his faith had to be alive to be worth anything. Once, when Ellen was in high school, he had stood for seven hours in the pouring rain before election day passing out Right to Life material.
“If we don’t stand up for the rights of unborn children, who will?” he said to Ellen when she studied the pamphlets.
His convictions made him a doer among his peers. Ellen and her siblings had attended St. Thomas Catholic School on Elizabeth Street, and when the school board needed a chairman to raise money for extracurricular activities, John Barrett started a bingo program and ran it single-handedly.
The first Christmas Ellen’s family was in Ann Arbor, a young couple from the church came caroling to the Barrett house as part of their holiday tradition. When they left, their dad’s eyes lit up and he reached for their mother.
“Let’s make that our family tradition, too.” For the next twenty years the Barrett women designated a full day during Christmas week to bake holiday cookies, and then the entire family would go caroling.
Their father’s favorite story of the holiday season was Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and that first Christmas in Ann Arbor he found a brown suede English top hat with a high crown like those worn during the Dickens era. He wore it caroling every Christmas after that.
For two years they loved Ann Arbor as if they’d lived there all their lives. Their mother’s sister, Mary, and her family lived three hours away in Battle Creek. Many weekends the Barretts would pile into the station wagon and set out for a raucous get-together between the two families.
It was during the Ann Arbor years that Ellen remembered her dad’s football physique becoming soft, giving way to a lack of exercise and overindulgence. He had a voracious appetite for everything in life and food was no exception.
“You’re the best cook in all of Michigan,” he would tell his wife, kissing her on the cheek as she cooked up yet another gooey dessert or hot batch of cookies. “Keep ’em coming.”
When the Barretts thought up fun things to do on the weekends, whether a Sunday drive or a trip to the lake, they always stopped for a treat.
“How ’bout a milk shake?” their dad would suggest, pulling the station wagon over in front of the local ice-cream parlor. If they were at the movies it was popcorn and licorice and frozen bonbons. At the lake it was cookies and rootbeer floats. The children were too active to be affected by the heavy foods, but their father spent much of his day sitting in front of a computer, and it wasn’t long before his expanding midsection began to jeopardize his health.
Food wasn’t his only vice. By then he had been chain-smoking cigarettes since he was fourteen years old. In the 1970s reports were released stating the dangers of smoking. Ellen’s dad was one of the doubters, brushing off the reports as political posturing and premature hysteria. He kept his cigarettes in his shirt pocket, close to his heart, and smoked almost constantly. Smoking was a part of his image, his character. He had no desire to give it up.
Then in late February 1977, the Barrett world changed completely. One night Ellen overheard her parents talking to their Aunt Betsy in California.
“No, we haven’t told the children yet,” her father said quietly.
“It’s not going to be easy for them.” It was her mother’s voice, and Ellen crept out of bed and sat at the top of the staircase where she wouldn’t be seen.
“Yes, it’s final.” Her father’s again. “We’ll move to Petoskey before the spring semester. Yes. That’s when the job wraps up here. Right. I’ll be teaching a full load of computer courses at the community college. I know. It’s a dream come true.”
Tears sprang to Ellen’s eyes. They couldn’t possibly leave Ann Arbor. She and Katy Bonavan were best friends and they’d promised to stay that way forever. She gulped back tears as she stood up and tiptoed back into her bedroom. Jane was still sleeping.
“Jane,” she whispered. “Wake up.”
Jane was eight that year and she opened her eyes, looking disoriented and afraid. “What?”
“Jane, we’re moving.”
“We are?”
Ellen nodded quickly. “Yes. To somewhere called Petoskey.”
Jane’s eyes grew wide with concern. “You mean we’re moving to another country?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“When are we going?”
“In a few months.”
Jane raised up onto her knees, still half-asleep, and hugged her older sister tightly. “It’s okay, Ellen. We’ll still have each other. I’ll be your best friend wherever we go.”
Ellen smiled through her tears. “I know. Love you, Jane.”
“Love you, too.” Jane collapsed back into bed. “Good night.”
A month later they watched their belongings disappear on a moving van headed for Petoskey. Then they climbed into a station wagon loaded with pillows and suitcases and drove away. The neighbors lined up along the street to say good-bye, many with tears in their eyes.
“Come back and visit!”
“Don’t forget to write!”
Ellen was ten and old enough to know that people would forget and visits would be rare, if ever. She began crying as they passed Almondinger Park and she didn’t stop for three hours. Petoskey, with its shoreline community and Victorian houses, was not in another country, but it might as well have been.
Ellen’s father was quietly understanding. He had promised his children they would not move again, but this time there had been no choice. The Parsons plant in Ann Arbor had closed down and he had accepted a teaching position at North Central Community College in Petoskey. By June that year they had settled in a neighborhood just west of the college. They bought a four-bedroom, corner house with towering maple trees, a wraparound porch, and a fenced backyard.
While her siblings adjusted quite naturally to the move, Ellen began eating to appease her loneliness. By the time she was in junior high she was a hefty twenty pounds overweight.
She began spending more time writing. She kept a journal and wrote poems, which she shared with her parents.
“Hmm,” her mother would say thoughtfully “I guess I don’t really understand it.”
Ellen would take the poem to her father. He would shut out the rest of the world and read it thoughtfully, sometimes with tears in his eyes.
“Sweetheart,
it’s wonderful,” he would tell her. “Someday you’re going to be a famous writer.”
“Oh, Daddy!” Ellen would blush. “Do you really like it?”
“It’s fantastic. Can I keep this copy for myself?”
The first four years in Petoskey were innocent and carefree, despite her struggle with weight. In summer their dad would get off work, squeeze into his swimsuit, and take the family for a late-afternoon swim at Petoskey State Beach. The sand stretched for what seemed like miles, and Ellen and her brother and sisters would play volleyball in the shallow pools near the shore. Despite his own worsening problem with weight, Dad could still palm a volleyball and rise halfway out of the water for a serve. Mom would laugh and wave from a nearby blanket, thoroughly content to watch the others play.
The summer after she turned fourteen, Ellen began noticing boys. She became keenly aware of the way they paid attention to other, thinner girls. One afternoon she went home, rummaged through her parents’ bookcase, and found a dusty old paperback called Dr. Stillman’s Quick Weight Loss Diet. The front cover promised a fifteen-pound weight loss in one week. Determined to keep her plans private, Ellen whisked the book into her bedroom and studied the doctor’s diet plan.
The next morning Ellen ate three eggs for breakfast, cottage cheese for lunch, and only the meat from her dinner plate. No fruit, vegetables, bread, or sweets passed her lips, and in three months she went from size twelve jeans to an eight. The diet was neither balanced nor healthy, and twice she nearly fainted because of low blood sugar. But it worked, and that summer she slimmed down even further when she sprouted three inches, seemingly overnight. By the time she started high school that fall she had been approached more than once by a representative from a local modeling agency.
“Daddy, please, can I get new clothes for school?” she asked her father one night.
He smiled at her. “Of course, honey I’m so proud of you for losing weight. Pick out whatever you want. By the way maybe you can share your secret with me sometime.” He patted his stomach, which had continued to grow.
“Ah, Dad. That’s just you. Don’t worry about it.”