Zero to Five - part three

During most of the high school years, Don and Honey were always Don and Honey. They had two best friends, Annie and Bill. Don thought Bill was “the best.” He liked to be where Bill was, breathe the same air as Bill, admire his strength when he threw a football, cheer him on to victory and touch him as much as he could in that aggressive punch-arm boy way. Bill and Annie were also going steady. Honey watched how Bill couldn’t seem to keep his hands off Annie. He was always touching her and kissing her and trying to feel things he shouldn’t. Annie would laugh and push him away. Honey felt vaguely hungry when she saw them together but also grateful that Don wasn’t like that. She never had to push him away, quite the opposite.

Both Honey and Don had beautiful singing voices. They would sing duets, looking adoringly at each other performing perfectly for the rest of the school. They were inseparable but Honey felt vaguely that she wanted something more. Honey began to act in the school plays and discovered she had a talent for drama. She began to see herself as starring in her own life story. Honey developed into a beauty and other boys began to pay attention to her. Honey she found she liked it. Eventually, one particular young man, whose air of masculinity nearly overwhelmed her, asked her out and she, telling Leone a tale, went.

They went to the drive-in movies in his car. She admired the firm upholstery, he invited her to run her fingers over it in the back seat. He kissed her and touched her and couldn’t seem to keep his hands off her. He whispered in her ear and lightly nipped its pink, curled edge. Her breath came faster and a honeyed, warm tension suffused her body. Oh, don’t stop, don’t stop. He touched her with a sweet insistence she had never experienced before. They fumbled together and then found a rhythm that felt right and good and real. Now, she knew what she wanted. She knew what she’d been missing.

That night she felt wonderful, warm and loved and when they kissed goodbye he promised her that he felt the same and wanted to be with her again and again. Honey entered the front door walking on air and Leone stepping out of the dark and slapped her face. “Where were you?” she demanded. “Who were you with?”

As Leone turned her back, Honey saw over Leone’s shoulder my father sitting, dejected and crying, hugging himself next to the fireplace. “Are you just going to let this happen?” Leone challenged him. “What will people think when they know you are not man enough to hold on to your steady girl?”

“Stop it, Mother!” tried Honey. “I only went out with friends!”
“You! You bad, bad girl!” screamed Leone. “Don’t talk to me and tell me your lies!”
The argument rose in volume and venom. George Edward, who always tried to stay away from argument with his wife, sat in the background, looking worried and annoyed. He wanted to support Honey. He loved his daughter but he knew better than to get between the women in his life. On the few occasions when he had, he’d reaped a bitter reward. Pleasing Leone, he fared no better. “Now, now,” he kept saying and thought wildly about taking off his belt.

George kept looking at Don and then made a decision. “Don,” he said quietly to him, a sympathetic hand on his shoulder hiding the distaste he felt at Don’s unmanly tears. “Go home. Come back in the morning.”

George knew that the arguments between Leone and Honey were the result of steadily increasing, long standing resentment and misunderstanding. Leone’s son, Lyle, was the light of her life, the miracle she’d hoped for, the confirmation and culmination of womanhood. Giving birth to a daughter that September morning in 1930 when Lyle was three simply gave evidence to the world that their family was a perfect one. Two parents committed in marriage, two children, a boy then a girl, no divorce, no scandal just a perfect little picture. Honey’s home birth was greeted by Leone with a kind of ho-hum smugness. She turned the baby over to her father and then rolled over and went to sleep. It was up to George, as he was known to the world, Edward as Leone called him when she was angry, to care for the new little girl that graced his life. His little Carol Darlene, his Honey, his second little daughter, filled a void that had grown out of the losses of his first wife and child.

The arguments between Leone and Honey were the result of steadily increasing, long standing resentment and misunderstanding. Leone’s son, Lyle, was the light of her life, the miracle she’d hoped for, the confirmation and culmination of womanhood. Giving birth to a daughter three years later was simply evidence for the world that their family was a perfect one. Two parents committed in marriage, two children, a boy then a girl no divorce, no scandal just a perfect little picture. Honey’s home birth was greeted by Leone with a kind of ho-hum smugness. She turned the baby over to her father and then rolled over and went to sleep. It was up to George, as he was known to the world, Edward as Leone called him, to care for the new little girl that graced his life. His Honey, his second little daughter, filled a void that had grown out of the losses of his first wife and child.

Now, George grew desperate in the rising furor and his belt slipped the loops of his pants, materializing in his hands. Honey saw her danger too late. “Daddy!” she screamed. “Please! No!” as the belt landed again and again on her back.

“Are you going to stop lying to your mother?” he shouted, tears threatening to unman him, fear and despair at what he was doing clenching his heart and hardening his hand.

“I didn’t lie!” she screamed at him.

It went on and on, Honey stubbornly refusing to bend to either her mother’s will or her father’s beating. It moved through the house until Honey backed up against the bathroom door where she’d meant to find a locked refuge. There she dropped her arm at just the wrong moment and that belt buckle caught the side of her head knocking her unconscious. Instantly George stopped and looked at the bleeding, unconscious girl who was his precious Honey. George’s father beat him, his brothers and his sisters regularly. It was a normal part of raising a farming family of first generation German immigrants at the turn of the century. But this, this was wrong. George knew it suddenly, irrevocably in every cell of his body. He reached down and scooped up his daughter in his arms and carried her to her bed, over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of the expression on his wife’s face. Avid. The word swallowed his mind. Greedy and unforgiving. Triumphant. George’s stomach turned.

Zero to Five - part two

When the twins were born just a little more than a month later, Honey took them to the office building where Don had become the darling of the steno pool. He could type faster than anyone there courtesy of the National Guard. They thought that made him unique and wonderful and also just like them. He would laugh and gossip and they all liked him equally, like he was one of them; the bitter middle-aged women and the disappointed unlovely girls . He lightened their world and they either adored him and thought him "such a nice boy” or swooned and fantasized about him. He hated it when Honey showed up and broke into that bubble. He was embarrassed to be a father at all, let alone a father of three. Mother was twenty and he, nine months younger, was just nineteen.
When Leone first laid eyes on him she thought she adored this lovely, polite and smiling young man. Something in her just knew he was safe for a troublesome teenage daughter. She breathed an unconscious sigh of relief and set about to manipulate a relationship between he and Honey. Leone felt she had a right to be manipulative. She was worried because at thirteen, Honey suddenly, inexplicably grew moody. She seemed troubled and it was then that the migraines that had plagued her off and on since childhood anchored their teeth in her head and refused to let go until the day she died.

What Leone didn’t know was that Honey had a secret. That secret worked on her and demanded behavior that Leone thought only “bad women” exhibited. Leone was constantly accusing her and worrying that her behavior would “get her into trouble”. When Don came over to study, Leone manufactured “going steady” as a cure for Darlene’s troubles. Now the other boys would leave her alone, she reasoned. Don went along with this arrangement because it seemed pleasant enough. Honey was fourteen and he would be fourteen that summer, but he was big for his age, nearly six foot and such a nice boy. It suited him to be thought of as “Honey’s Boyfriend”. The title made him feel safe instead of exposed.

But Honey wanted something from my father. She just wanted, she wasn’t sure what because the secret was so fleeting and furtive and over with no possibility of repeat and no culmination to reach. Honey was just left feeling surprised and soiled and wanting. The secret had been another nice boy once.

Leone trusted this young cousin who came to visit before being shipped off to war. It was romantic and patriotic to host the young men about to lay their lives on the line. Leone thought back to the time she folded bandages and promised all the boys she'd marry them if they'd just come back from the Great War so far removed. But now they were calling it the Second World war and Leone felt guilty, frightened for him and warm toward her cousin all at the same time. “Be nice to him,” said Leone to Honey the month before her thirteenth birthday.

Honey was nice to him because that’s what her mother had told her to be, though he was no longer a nice boy or a nice man. After he left, mother had the secret, a hunger and a growing confusion.

Don was the answer to a mother’s prayer, thought Leone, because he didn’t seem to be interested in getting Darlene alone and he was always a perfect gentleman. Honey thought she was in love. Her heart would turn over when this tall, handsome boy would walk toward her down the school hall. Surrounding him like lesser wolves around the alpha male were a constant pack of younger boys who all looked up at him adoringly. Don hung his arm around my mother’s shoulders and stood there talking to them while Darlene propped him up. She smiled and smiled.

Zero to Five - Part 1

Memory plays tricks, gives us insight we never had during the real time unfolding of events. And memory is all we have. Darlene always said that she’d write a book when certain people died. She wanted the memories preserved and the actions justified. She wanted her story told. They are all dead now, the nice boys and the sassy girls, the mean men and the angry women. Darlene never wrote the book. When she thought she might, it was too late. Her brain, riddled with metastasized breast cancer, led her to believe and see things that never were. She didn’t want to write the book anyway. That was always going to be my job. I was the watcher and the thinker. I wanted to know what happened next and why things happened the way did. I wanted to have all the answers.

I remember a golden day when the sunlight produced diamonds out of nothing but the cascade of sweet water as it splashed into the long-sided, rounded end, copper wash tub. It had been her mother’s, so my grandmother Leone told me. They would boil the water in it over a fire and the washer-woman would take a long, wooden pole and stir the clothes to get them clean. Sometimes she would add ash from the fire to the mix and lard from a previously boiled down pig. I was too young to think such things strange. I simply took it in as I was told.

The copper pot was now my bath tub. During the hot summer before my second birthday it was perfect to climb into and feel the delicious thrill of cold force a sharp intake of breath as the water miraculously rose to just under my chin. I was in and then out, then in and out, in again and out in just that time. I couldn’t stay in that cold sweetness long. My warm body and the hot summer sun needed to warm it. But then it would get too warm and more water would need to go in. The small square of grass in my grandmother’s back garden became soaked and muddy in patches. I don’t remember anyone around while I was engaged in this absorbing activity. I only remember the sun and the water and the light.

During that summer my mother, Darlene, lay in a darkened room. The window looked down on the yard but the blind was pulled and the curtain closed. I have pictures from around this time. I look shocked and solemn whenever she’s holding me; she’s grimly smiling. Two babies appear in the pictures too. The twins. Wriggling, squinting, squalling lumps on pulled up blankets so the camera can see them better. A tall, darkly handsome man with deep ocean-blue eyes, looking a little like an overweight Elvis, appears occasionally too. Don the missing.

Darlene told the story later when I found myself beginning to hear some of the unsaid. She said she had to go and get him from Georgia. She got on the train at the Union Station in Portland. She was dressed in a swing-coat with a Peter-Pan collar that she’d made herself of green and black wool in a large plaid pattern. She packed a picnic basket with fried chicken, apples and cheese for the trip because she didn’t have any money. It was September and the swing-coat couldn’t begin to hide her second pregnancy. Twins never occurred to her. She just thought this was a very big baby with very busy arms and legs.

She got up to go to the bathroom. She did this often on the train trip but this time when she got back to her seat, a very large black lady in the Darlene’s coat was finishing off the last of her fried chicken. The apples peeped out of one of her pockets and the cheese wrapper held only crumbs. Darlene stood there watching her in silent shock. She didn’t even have enough presence of mind to feel outrage. The woman licked her fingers and just as silently handed Darlene the basket. Then she turned on her side and went to sleep in Darlene’s seat.

Darlene spent that night on the train and the next night sitting up, listening to the growls of her stomach punctuated by the snores of that lady. When she got to Georgia, Darlene gathered up her things and turned to leave the train, passing this lady again. “You-all have the nicest time in Georgia,” she said grinning and laughed out loud.

Darlene continued to hear her laughter as she made her clumsy way off the train. Don stood there waiting for her, hands in pockets and a scowl on his face. Darlene burst into tears. “Oh, for Pete sake!” he said and stomped off, looking back at her laden with empty picnic basket, huge belly and scruffy suitcase. He waved at her impatiently to come along.

My father took her to a boarding house and left her. The woman there, taking pity, gave her a cup of tea and a sandwich and listened with growing disgust to my mother’s tale of woe. The woman settled Darlene in bed and made a few phone calls. That night, Don, looking like a brewing storm was at the boarding house dinner table next to my mother who was so delighted she couldn’t sit still. On his other side was his soon to be former Commanding Officer of the National Guard. His “war games” as mother put it would soon be over. Since it was long after World War II and the Korean War wouldn’t heat up for another year or so, my father was discharged and sent home to be with his heavily pregnant wife and very young daughter.

On the train back to Oregon, Don slept, draping his long, heavy body over my mother much like a child would. But for the time being, as uncomfortable as she was, Darlene was content.