It was mostly girls jitterbugging with other girls, but they did have a good turnout from the guys still home working at the factories nearby and some of the Coast Guard boys stationed over in Sturgeon Bay. Sometimes the music went on until after midnight, but nobody in town complained. Everybody was working hard, and they deserved a little recreation. Even the nuns from Saint Mary’s came over and sat with Momma on the porch and watched the fun.
It was a busy time for everyone. When Momma and Angie weren’t cooking, they were rolling bandages for the Red Cross or tending to the big victory garden in the back. In their spare time, all the girls wrote to the servicemen and sent packages of good Polish food to all the boys from Pulaski.
The youngest girl, Sophie Marie, had just graduated from high school and was still torn about what to do. She felt she had a religious vocation, and she had planned on entering the convent right away, but she also knew her sisters needed her at home to help at the filling station. She cried when she told Sister Mary Patricia that she would have to wait until her brother, Wink, came home after the war to take over. Sister Mary Patricia was very understanding. She said, “Sophie, it could be for the best. I entered at seventeen, and not that I regret my decision, but I often wish I had lived a little more out in the world. I think it might have helped me understand more what the girls are going through. And, sometimes, we can serve Him best by serving our families and our country.”
Fritzi hadn’t said anything, because she hadn’t wanted to be a bad influence on the kid, but she was glad Sophie was staying. She was a big draw with the customers. And as Fritzi figured it, after the war, none of the girls would ever have the chance to run a gas station again. Besides, Sophie had the rest of her life to be a nun, so why not have a little fun while you can? The only downside with Sophie was that Fritzi had to watch her language around her, and she hated that. She just loved to cuss a blue streak and shock the truck drivers.
All the Jurdabralinski girls, including Momma and Angie, were kept busy morning, noon, and night, but they were not too busy not to be worried about Wink. They had not heard from him in a while. When they finally received a V-mail letter from him, they were so relieved they called Poppa in Hot Springs and read it to him over the phone.
Dear Folks,
Guess what? I am writing this letter to you from the deck of a troop ship. Our entire unit is being shipped overseas. Don’t know where we’re going yet, but I am sure it will be where Uncle Sam thinks we can do the most good.
This ocean is something else. I didn’t know there was that much water in the world. A lot of the guys are pretty seasick, but I am OK so far. Sure wish I had my rod and reel with me. There must be some pretty big fish swimming around under there. Don’t worry about me. I am in good hands and the grub is pretty good. Not as good as Momma’s, though. I think this war will be over soon and I will be home again before you know it.
Love,
Wink
P.S. I really appreciate you girls taking over the station for Poppa and me. I have shown the guys in my unit the photo you sent, and they all say I sure have some swell sisters. And pretty, too. A few of them said after the war, they were headed to Pulaski to see you in person.
PULASKI, WISCONSIN
Dear Wink,
Don’t know where you’ve ended up, but we all really miss you, buddy. Momma is still keeping that candle lit for you over at church, and she and Sophie never miss daily mass, so you are in good hands on that score.
I just wish I was there with you so I could keep an eye on you. I know you are a big-shot flyboy now, but I can’t help it. You’re still my little brother you know, and, despite it all, I am quite fond of you, so don’t go being a hero on me. OK?
Fritzi
P.S. We hear that Poppa might be coming home soon. Not too soon, I hope. It was eight below zero here today, and the pumps froze again. Well, gotta go. Take good care of yourself, Winks. We are so proud of you … and give them Krauts hell for me, will ya?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
POINT CLEAR, ALABAMA
EVERY MORNING, SOOKIE WALKED AROUND AND FILLED HER BIRD feeders. She couldn’t let the blue jays go hungry, but she still missed her small birds. They wouldn’t come to the small-bird feeders she’d tried, either. Every once in a while, one or two would come and feed on the seeds that had fallen on the ground, but she still had more blue jays than anything. Mr. Nadleshaft at the Birds-R-Us store said it was a common problem, but so far, nobody seemed to have an answer.
When Sookie came in from the yard, the phone in the kitchen was ringing. It was Lenore, who sang into the phone, “I know a little girl who’s having a big birthday on the thirty-first.”
Sookie wanted to sing back, “No, I’m not,” but she didn’t.
“What I want to know is where are we going this year? Have you thought about it? I know where I think we should go.”
“Mother, I have thought about it, and I really don’t want to do anything this year. I just want to skip it.”
“What? Skip your birthday? Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly. I really just want to be with Earle and spend a quiet evening at home.”
“A quiet evening at home? On your birthday? Sookie, what in the world is wrong with you? Are you over there drinking? I swear, you are just getting more peculiar every day. You can have a quiet evening alone with Earle anytime, but you are not going to skip your birthday, for heaven’s sake. And, anyhow, it’s not just about you. I’m the one who gave birth to you. So don’t make me have to come over there and spank you. Besides, I’ve already written the funniest poem, and I’ve set it to music. ‘Roses are red, my dear, violets are blue, after forty-eight hours, then there was you!’ Oh, and it goes on and on.”
A thousand smart replies went through Sookie’s mind, but what was the use? No matter what she said, the woman was determined to continue perpetuating this lie to the grave.
“Sookie, are you still there?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I think we should have the party out on my pier this year.”
“I see. Are you going to cook?”
“Of course not. We’ll have it catered. And you need to start thinking about who all you want to invite.”
She supposed she would just have to go along with the charade. She was still confused about how to handle the situation and she wasn’t up for a fight with Lenore over it. And so once again, she would be celebrating the wrong birthday. Oh, Lord what a mess.
SOOKIE FOUND HERSELF IN a strange position. She was grateful to Lenore for adopting her, but now that she knew she was not a Simmons, it was hard for her to keep on pretending. She went back and forth between being grateful and wanting to kill her, but as Dr. Shapiro had said, it was natural to feel that way. Still, it did make it hard when Lenore blathered on and on about how proud she was to have the small and delicate Simmons foot.
Lenore hadn’t had the Simmons foot for years. She just didn’t know it. Lenore was so vain she wouldn’t wear her glasses, and so when Sookie took her shopping and she would ask to see a shoe in a size 6, Sookie would quietly walk back to the storeroom and ask the clerk to bring her mother the same shoe, only in a size 7½. It was a small white lie, but Sookie knew that any other way Winged Victory would cause a scene and insist they were all wrong. Once Lenore believed in something, you could never convince her otherwise.
She believed she was perfectly self-sufficient, too, but she wasn’t. Lenore wouldn’t even be going to water therapy three times a week if she had let them get her a walk-in tub. “Those are for invalids,” she had said, and then she proceeded to fall getting out of her bath, knocked herself out, nearly broke her hip, and wound up at the emergency room. When she woke up in the hospital, Lenore thought she was dying and called everyone and told them if they wanted to see her alive, they needed to get there right away. “I doubt I will live through the night,” she said. All the kids had dropped everything and run home from college, and Buck and Bunny had flown
in all the way from North Carolina. The next day, when she woke up alive, Lenore turned to Sookie and said, “Sookie, call Jo Ellen and tell her I need her to come over here and fix my hair, and tell that orderly she needs to water these flowers.”
That afternoon, when everyone had gone home, Sookie had asked her, “Mother, do you know how much trouble you caused? You scared everybody half to death, calling them like that. Carter almost killed himself speeding to get here in time.”
Lenore said, “Well, you’re just lucky I survived, but if I had died, they needed to be here.” Then she added, “Good heavens, Sookie, you sound like you’re sorry I didn’t die.”
“That’s not what I meant, Mother, and you know it.”
But Lenore wasn’t listening. “I don’t think I like this room. Sookie, go down the hall and ask them if they have something with a better view.”
THE MISHAP
PULASKI, WISCONSIN
WORKING AT A FILLING STATION COULD BE REALLY DANGEROUS. GAS was highly flammable. Hubcaps could pop off and hit you in the face. You could burn yourself on overheated engines. Tires could blow up if you put too much air in them. And when slamming down hoods, if you weren’t careful, fingers could be broken.
Fritzi had told the girls a hundred times that they needed to keep their minds on what they were doing. So far, there had been only one serious mishap at the station. And, of course, a man was involved.
TULA WAS ALL ATWITTER, because Arty Kowalinowski, the handsome six-foot star football player from Pulaski High, was home on a four-day furlough from the army. And thrill of thrills, he had asked her out to the movies that Friday night. He had not known it, but Tula had spent most of her junior and senior years writing “Mrs. Arty Kowalinowski” all over her notebooks and dreaming about him at night. But this was the first time he had asked her out, and so she was over the moon. Tula had not even gone on the date yet, but she was already hearing wedding bells and planning what she would wear. Something with a lot of white netting, she thought.
That Thursday night, she spent hours washing her hair over and over again—trying her best to get the gasoline smell out—scraping the grease out from under her fingernails, and picking out her outfit. The next morning, she didn’t want to chip one of her newly painted bright red fingernails, so she showed up at work wearing big, thick workman gloves.
She was in such a daze all day that it was hard for Fritzi to get her to do much of anything. And Tula was not happy when late that afternoon, a huge black 1936 Chevy with transmission problems came in for service. Tula wanted to wait and do it the next day, but Fritzi wouldn’t let her. Tula was their main mechanic, so she rolled under the car on the wooden dolly, grumbling about it, but she still wouldn’t take her gloves off.
Tula was an excellent mechanic, but that day, she must have been thinking about her date with Arty Kowalinowski, because when she was underneath the car working, she somehow unscrewed the wrong valve, and suddenly an entire pint of thick five-year-old filthy oil gushed out and landed all over her face.
Tula screamed so loudly that Momma heard her all the way over at the house. Gertrude got to her first and grabbed her by the legs and pulled her out sputtering and spitting out black oil.
Her screams were so loud that the fire truck and the police showed up. Five minutes later, Tula was still hysterical and dripping oil as they led her over to the house to try to clean her up.
It was already five o’clock, and she had a date in two hours. She knew Arty was leaving the next day, and she might not ever get another date with him again.
But the oil was everywhere: in her hair, her eyelashes, up her nose, and in her ears. After being scrubbed for at least an hour, her face was still stained a strange gray color. She and Momma had shampooed her hair three times with Oxydol soap, but even so, she still reeked of old, rancid oil. Tula looked in the mirror and realized it was no use. She couldn’t possibly go. “I look like a dead rat,” she said.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, ARTY Kowalinowski was standing in front of the Pulaski theater waiting for his date, when Fritzi and Gertrude showed up instead. Tula had threatened to kill both of them if they told him what had happened, so all they said was, “Tula’s not coming.”
He was disappointed, but they all went inside anyway and had popcorn and saw the movie Kitty Foyle with Ginger Rogers and a cartoon.
While they were sitting in the theater enjoying the movie, Tula was upstairs at home, sitting in the big claw-foot tub, soaking her hair and bemoaning her fate to her mother and Sophie. “I begged Fritzi to let me wait until tomorrow, but she’s so bossy. She wouldn’t let me. She said, ‘No, it has to be done today.’ I hate her. I just hate her.”
“Now, Tula, she’s your sister. You don’t hate her. That’s a sin.”
“I don’t care. Arty Kowalinowski is the only boy I ever really loved, and she made me miss my one chance to go out with him. Now he’ll probably meet some other girl, and I’ll wind up an old maid, and it’s all her fault.”
When Gertrude and Fritzi got home later that night, they went upstairs to see Tula, who unfortunately, still looked gray. “We brought you some popcorn,” said Gertrude. “And Arty said to tell you he was just heartbroken not to get to see you this time.”
“He did?”
“Yes,” added Fritzi. “And when we gave him your picture, he said he would be looking at it and thinking about you every day until he got back.”
“He did?” said Tula, reaching for the popcorn.
“Oh, yes …”
It was a bold-faced lie, but it made Tula feel better.
THE WAFFLE HOUSE
BOOTH NO. 7
AT THEIR NEXT SESSION, DR. SHAPIRO SUDDENLY LOOKED UP FROM his notes and asked Sookie a question that surprised her.
“What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“I’ve heard a lot about your mother, but you haven’t mentioned him.”
“I haven’t?”
“No.”
“Oh … well, he was so sweet, bless his heart.”
“He must have seen your mother’s behavior. Did he ever try and stop it?”
“No. But you didn’t know Daddy. He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world. And when I would complain that she was pushing me around, he would say, ‘Oh, honey, I know you don’t want to join that club or do whatever, but she’s only pushing you because she loves you, and it means so much to her,’ so no, he was never very much help.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“You mean, did it make me mad? Oh no. He couldn’t help it. Poor Daddy always had a blind spot when it came to Mother. When they met she had evidently been the belle of the ball … and I don’t think Daddy ever got over the fact that she married him. Every year on their anniversary, he would play the song they had danced to at the Senior Military Ball … and they would waltz all around the living room.”
“So in other words, you and your brother grew up in a house with a domineering mother and a father who gave you little or no protection.”
Driving home, Sookie thought about what Dr. Shapiro had said. It was true. Her father had seen how unhappy Lenore had made her, and he really had not stood up for her. Should she be mad at Lenore for that or mad at Daddy? Or mad at both? Oh, Lord. She didn’t want to be mad at anybody. There was a part of her that just hated sitting around, whining about her childhood. It was embarrassing at her age. But Dr. Shapiro said it was important. Still, it made her feel creepy, like she was doing something bad, betraying the Simmons family secrets, and there were a few.
THE SIMMONSES, LIKE MOST families in the South, had lost everything during the war, and all they had left was their pride and stories of the “glorious past.” Her grandmother told tales of how her mother, Sookie’s namesake, Sarah Jane Simmons, had single-handedly saved Greenleaves, the family plantation, by charming the Yankee soldiers and dazzling them with her beauty, and how after the war, three Yankee officers had written and begged her to m
arry them, which was, of course, out of the question … and on and on.
As a child, all these stories had enthralled Lenore. But in Lenore’s case, with each passing year, the “glorious past” had become more and more glorious until in 1939, she had confided to a friend, “I could have written Gone with the Wind about Greenleaves, but Margaret Mitchell beat me to it.”
When Buck and Sookie were growing up, Lenore had waxed poetic, ad nauseam, all about the grandeur of the old Simmons family plantation, “almost a complete replica of Tara,” she said, “only much better furnished.” But when he was in high school Buck had looked it up in the Selma Civil War Archives over at the courthouse.
The truth was that Greenleaves was never a plantation. It was just a nice two-story farmhouse located on a few acres of land, and the Simmons family’s only encounter with the enemy during the war was when one little skinny half-starved Union soldier, who was lost, stopped by and asked for directions. But to hear Lenore tell it, hundreds of Yankee soldiers had marched through the county, looting and stealing and digging up every inch of their land, looking for buried silver and gold. The fact that the man her grandmother later married got drunk and burned the place down was somehow never mentioned.
GOOD-BYE, MR. HATCHETT
PULASKI, WISCONSIN
1942
ALL THAT YEAR, EVERYBODY IN TOWN WAS BUSY PITCHING IN TO HELP with the war effort. Housewives were saving grease for bullets, and were collecting all the rubber and aluminum and scrap metal they could scare up. The Jurdabralinski girls, like all the others, had given up their nylon stockings, which were needed for parachutes, and now everybody had a victory garden.
The good news was that Poppa had come home from the hospital, and they all celebrated. But the war news was not good. Pulaski had already lost three of their boys, and Fritzi was worried about Wink and all the other guys she knew who were now in the thick of it.