ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 3
Groceries
After my first trip to the grocery store, I carried a brown paper sack of food to Louise and Mike’s.
Louise stood by the sink with her hands over her mouth, watching me store milk in her refrigerator and arrange bananas and apples in a glass bowl on the table.
Louise holding her hands to her mouth was a bad sign.
“How did you know what to buy?” she asked.
“I just picked up a few things I thought you needed.”
“How much did it cost?”
“It’s all right,” I told her. She had granted my brother Ray Power of Attorney a year earlier and he managed her bills, but trying to explain the situation now only confused her.
“No. I want to pay,” she said and removed a five dollar bill from the drawer where she kept a little cash. “I’d rather pay than be obligated to you.”
“. . . rather pay,” Mike mimicked perfectly in a soft voice.
I refused and she thrust the money toward me, her face flushed. I reluctantly took the bill, replacing it in the drawer when she wasn’t looking.
“I’ll write a list for you when I want groceries,” she said. “You don’t have to buy our food. We can buy it ourselves.”
Mike nodded. “ . . . ourselves.”
“I only –” I began, and stopped when I glimpsed the expression on her face.
From then on we smuggled groceries inside early in the morning or while they napped. Kipling and I behaved like backward robbers, signaling to each other an all-clear that it was safe to deliver the goods.
As long as food was visible they didn’t question where it came from, or noticed that they never ran out. Their kitchen had become like the fairy tale purse that magically refilled itself.
The glass cookie jar in the center of the kitchen table became our barometer. As long as it was full, life was serene, but once it reached the halfway point, Louise slipped into a low-grade panic. “Mike needs more cookies,” she’d fuss. “Go to the store and buy Mike’s cookies.”
He easily went through a package of vanilla sandwich cookies a day. I decided to ration them – all those cookies couldn’t be good for him, right?
But the first time the cookie jar approached empty, I stepped into the kitchen and saw a torn-open package of cookies. I peered closer – where had those come from? – and discovered they were two years out of date.
I surrendered and reinstated the continuously full cookie jar. He ate well otherwise; he was physically vigorous. When I changed the sheets I discovered vanilla sandwich cookies beneath his pillow, he tucked cookies into his pajama and jeans pockets.
I set about cleaning the house, looking for more out-of-date cookies and discovered that Louise herself had attempted to create that same fairy tale purse.
1929 Out with Vince. Saw “The Circus,” but I paid for everything. Also gave him $3.60. He says he’ll make up for it. I wonder? He is out of work, but I have faith. He keeps me wondering BUT TIME SHALL TELL. Hope I’m not sorry in the end.
Stashed in the basement and the breezeway and in the pantry I found fifty-eight, four-roll packages of toilet paper. An unopened case of Smith Brothers cough drops was stacked on top of a box filled with twenty-four packets of lime Jello. A five-drawer dresser full of candy – only candy – hardened and melded together. Plastic grocery bags bulging with stale cookies hung on coat hooks. A cabinet on the breezeway was lined with cake mixes, all outdated, all attacked by insects. Cans of food – with labels I didn’t recognize or missing altogether – rusted in the basement. Mice had torn into packages of rice in the pantry, worms spun cocoons in the dried potato mixes. In a desk I found eleven packages of chocolate chips and beneath those, five chewed-open packages of dates.
The Depression was vivid in Louise’s memory. “We lived in Chicago and for a while we survived on eggs,” she told me. “Every few weeks your grandmother sent us a wooden crate with six dozen eggs and that’s what we ate. There wasn’t any work so there wasn’t any money.”
She’d even saved the wooden crate that conveyed eggs between Michigan and Chicago. It hung in the garage, my grandfather’s address still visible on the yellowed shipping label.
My mother, who was a child during the Depression and recalled her father pretending to leave for work every morning after he lost his job so her mother wouldn’t worry, had saved, too. She’d scraped margarine off the margarine wrappers, and the refrigerator was always filled with dibs and dabs of leftover food in a myriad of plastic containers. Leftovers grew fuzz and had to be thrown out, bread staled, unopened packages outlasted their “use by” dates.
For both of them, the act of saving had become more important than the using.
One set of cabinets in Louise’s kitchen held only used bits of plastic wrap and old plastic containers. The old outhouse was literally piled from floor to ceiling with neatly folded brown paper sacks, their open ends all facing outward. Empty and washed glass jars that had once held spaghetti sauce, applesauce, orange juice, pickles, mustard and aspirin filled cardboard boxes and shelves in the garage.
Little pats of butter and plastic squeeze packages of mustard from Meals on Wheels were piled willy nilly in the refrigerator until I discreetly removed them. Rubber bands. Clips and twists off bread wrappers. Old envelopes. Even when her hair was washed and set, Aunt Louise resisted having the curls combed out. “I’ll save them until I go out,” she argued.
A cardboard box in the closet had a carefully written message in red crayon on the lid: Mike’s underwear too worn to mend.
When I offered to clean out the pantry, she insisted, “Leave it. We may find a use for it later.”
Afraid they’d eat spoiled food by mistake I began removing a boxes and bags every morning after I made coffee, piling them in garbage bags on our back porch for a future trip to the landfill. I could barely see my progress.
1929 I am a fool and an ass and I feel terrible. Frank told me Vince is married. Yes!! He’s married!!!
We fought and he turned into a brute, almost choked me to death, I never cried so in my life. I hate him. I hate hate hate him. After the money and everything. I cried all night. I hate him.
The Farm
During the early 1900s, a notorious Lithuanian real estate dealer whose name was still synonymous with “shyster,” heavily advertised Mason County property in Chicago and Pennsylvania where thousands of newly-arrived Lithuanians had clustered. A dream-come-true, he lured: Cheap land, land ripe for raising oversized crops and big healthy families.
Hundreds of Lithuanians bought into his promise and packed up for rural Michigan. They formed settlements where Lithuanian was the first language, kept Lithuanian customs, supported a Lithuanian Catholic church and two satellite parishes. Barns sprang up before houses. They held pot lucks where kugelis and suris and bacon buns – and alcohol – reigned. They founded a school taught by the Sisters of St. Casimir, Lithuanian nuns from Chicago, and scrimped and sacrificed to enroll their children. Multi-syllabic surnames ending in ‘as’ and ‘is’ and ‘e’ abounded.
Much of the farmland was sand, and much of it worthless.
Farms that produced crops were often abandoned by the next generation who went searching for more secure income. The older generation died off, many without fulfilling their dreams, and the farms were sold to downstaters for deer-hunting property. Barns disintegrated, fences fell, hardwoods returned to the fields, wild animals reclaimed their forages.
Louise and Mike’s farm occupied a bluff fourteen miles inland from Lake Michigan. The farm stood as an island, bound on the north by the two-lane road, on the west by a deep ravine, and to the south and east by trees and the larger creek: Weldon Creek. Roadless National Forest stretched behind their land for miles. It hadn’t been a working farm in over twenty years. But it could be; until recently it had been that well-tended.
Hardwood trees –oaks and maples, beeches, ash, a few birches, many over a hundred feet tall and referred to as “overgrown,” by my brother Ray who knew timber –formed a skyline visible from a half mile away, a shady dense woods that hovered just beyond the barnyard’s barbed wire fence.
Louise and her first husband bought the farm in the 1940s. “Oh, I hated it here at first,” she’d said many times. “I had a good job with Time-Life in Chicago but Bill had never lived on a farm and he thought farming would be fun. The realtor showed him that creek and he went crazy. I’m embarrassed by how I harassed him the first two years. I wanted to go back to Chicago but of course we couldn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked.
She waved her hand and didn’t answer.
But Bill died suddenly of a heart attack and two years later Louise married Mike. The farm, now Louise and Mike’s, flourished in its small way. For several years they raised a dairy herd, then corn. Until the previous year, they’d sold their fresh produce from a driveway stand, restored antiques and kept a small antique shop on the farm
1929 Vince keeps calling but I won’t to talk to him. What a disappointment he is. I told him, “The only way I’ll see you if you have my money in your hand.”
Mae and I went to Rialto. A fattie with a Lincoln invited me to his room. Ha! Laugh! I hate men now.
Don’t feel so good. Big storm here tonight. They still scare me. The Bs are going to have a party. A lot of work. Good! I won’t have time to think.
Letter from Tofelia. Crazy with love. Gordon is perfect, Gordon treats her like a queen. Gordon, Gordon, Gordon. Gordon is a god. I think Gordon is a scalawag and not a nice scalawag, either. She’s too young to SEE him as a person. Younger than me and married. And me? I am double-crossed by a skunk. Why couldn’t I see Vince for what HE was? I thought I was smarter than I guess I am. Dumbbell.
Letter from Mother, news and asking about Vince– I blabbed his name from the rooftops when I was home. I’m not telling her he was a rat.
We shaped the routine of our days to Louise and Mike. I made their coffee, then fixed a light breakfast, sitting with them while they ate. Meals on Wheels brought lunch on weekdays, and I prepared dinner, with several visits in between from both Kipling and me. I willingly took on the major responsibility: I couldn’t banish the guilty suspicion I’d bullied Kipling into coming to Michigan.
Because Louise had recently been hospitalized, a program followed her at home for a few months. A nurse visited once a week to record her vitals and an aide was available for help with personal care.
Social services were stretched too thin for the number of people who they knew needed their assistance. “There are more we don’t know about,” Roberta, the nurse told me. “People who are infirm and just surviving any way they can.” She shook her head. “Some we don’t discover until it’s too late.”
There were no social services e available for Mike except Meals on Wheels. Without family to assist him, he’d be on his own until someone reported he’d descended into a dangerous state, then he would have been removed from his home and sent to a nursing facility.
Medicare, Home Health Care, Senior Services, Meals on Wheels, Social Security. I’d never dealt with any of it. Louise was suspicious of any sort of assistance, and it was my brother Ray who soothed the way for her acceptance. Fifty years separated Ray and Louise, but they might have been contemporaries.
Louise was quick to end conversations that didn’t interest her but she and Ray sat companionably for hours, their topics ranging across the world and back again. She sometimes called Ray “Johnny,” our father’s name, or asked me, “Is my brother coming over today?” meaning Ray.
“If I could have half her wisdom,” Ray said, “even in her state now.”
1929 Mae and I walked to where they’re building the Exposition and looked around. It’s enormous! I can’t wait. Pavilions from every country in the world. Mae and Phil are getting married. EVERYBODY is getting married..
A letter from Vince full of lies, he really loved me and was bored of his wife, and if only I’d . . .blah blah blah. I ripped it up and flushed it down Mrs. B’s toilet and it PLUGGED the drain. Had to mop up the floor. Mrs. B made me bleach the floor as if the water was dirty. It wasn’t – just dirty with Vince’s lies.
I had fled the village where I grew up three miles from Louise and Mike the minute I was able: off to college, then to the Northwest, determined to abandon my grubby self for the sophistication of the wider world, resolved to never return except to visit family, absolutely one hundred percent positive that my hometown held nothing for me, that I’d never become a writer if I was doomed to such provincialism. I wanted more. From the age of twelve I was on fire to escape.
But a curious thing happened. I abandoned my hometown physically, yet again and again I found myself haunting that rural area in my writing. What was wrong with me? Here I was, finally living in the world I’d fantasized, and now I was stealing mental trips back to the rural landscape I’d fought to escape.
I conjured the oak forests and rivers, Lake Michigan and its façade of tourism, the mania for deer hunting. I puzzled over what seemed a casual acceptance of suicide and the stiff-necked secrets of isolated families.
I ferreted out the characters of my memory: Clem, the damaged man who walked the roads day and night; the family I’d witnessed cooking acorn soup. I spent one wakeful night wrestling to recall the names of the three deaf brothers who lived all their adult lives in a one-room house near us. I dug deep, to the point that I would eventually write a mystery series about a woman who reluctantly returned to her rural Michigan town after tragedy.
While I considered our assistance to Louise and Mike an earth-shattering return to my homeland, most people weren’t aware I’d ever left. My family’s features were stamped on my face.
“How’s your mother doing?” the mail carrier asked, not, “You came back.”
“Sorry to hear about your dad,” an old neighbor said of my father who’d died suddenly eleven years earlier.
“I saw your cousin the other day.”
It was as if I’d just returned to the dance after a breath of fresh air. Of course I’d be back. What else made sense?
1929 I have a terrible cold. Everything is bleak and gloomy and miserable and awful and terrible ugly.
On a snowy afternoon, Ray drove into the driveway in that easy way of people who’d grown up with snow. After a near disastrous spin-out I regained my winter driving skills, although never to the confident nonchalance of my teenage years, which was just as well. Kipling took to snow-driving with ease. “Just forget you have a brake and gas pedal and you’ll be fine.” He simply shifted to another mental gear and serenely took to the roads.
Ray had brought his son, three-year old Lukas, to visit Louise on his way to pick up six-year old Jon from school. When Mike looked out the window and saw Ray lifting Lukas from the car’s back seat, he jumped up from the sofa and faded from the living room onto the sleeping porch where I glimpsed him sitting on the edge of his bed, very still, his hands quiescent on his knees. He won’t leave the sleeping porch until after Ray and Lukas leave.
Eighty-two or not, Louise visibly brightened when a man was present, no matter whether he was eighty or three. Her eyes flashed. Dimples deepened.
“Lukey, Lukey,” she teased, giving him the look as he emerged from his snowsuit. “How’s my little boyfriend?”
Chubby, fair and good-natured, Lukas smiled at the same time he gravely regarded her.
After Ray and Lukas left, I brought a dinner of pork chops in a wicker basket I’d found in the garage and would use for that purpose all during our stay. I sat at the table with them, a cup of coffee on my placemat. Louise still glowed from Ray and Lukas’s visit.
“That little boy rules the roost with a baby fist,” she said. “He’ll be a heartbreaker. You wait and see. The other one, too.”
“Jonukas?” I supplied.
She nodded, but I could see she was confused by his name. She'd also sometimes called her little brother, my father, Jonukas.
“Did you want children?” I stupidly asked. She was silent and I hoped she hadn’t heard me.
But she had. “I did,” she said, “but I couldn’t –” and stopped, looking off toward the darkening day, deflating.
Mike banged down his fork and glared at me, suspicious I’d said something to hurt Louise. We three sat in uncomfortable silence, neither of them eating, three clocks ticking into the room. It had been a day when Mike unexpectedly rewound the two mantel clocks and the wall clock. They all chimed at different times.
Unsure how to rectify the discomfort I’d caused, I blathered an anecdote I’d heard about snowshoe rabbits returning to Michigan, the proof being that one had been spotted lying beside the road, hit by a car.
Mike grunted and went back to eating his pork chop. Louise was not deterred. “I’m too old for anything,” she bemoaned, “and I’m getting older.”
“We’re all getting older,” Mike said in support, “all of us at the same time.”
“But I’m the oldest one here. I’m the oldest one for five miles around.”
“Hah,” Mike snorted. “A lot more than five miles around.”
Now she was angry but he’d accomplished what I couldn’t: deflecting her sudden melancholy into a hot retort. “You don’t know everything. What day is it?” she challenged smugly.
“It’s Tuesday,” Mike answered without hesitation. He was right; it was Tuesday.
“No, it’s not,” Louise said just as certainly.
Now Mike grew uncertain. He frowned, crossed and uncrossed his legs. “It’s Tuesday or Wednesday,” he said. “I think so, anyway.”
“It can’t be,” Louise insisted.
“I know it is.”
“You’re getting mad at me, Mikey,” Louise accused.
“How do you know?” he challenged her.
“Because I know you, that’s how I know.”
“Oh.”
‘Now do you know how I know?”
Mike turned his spoon wrong end around and poked it into his mashed potatoes. His eyes glazed. “I don’t know.”
As I carried the basket back to the little house over the worn and salted path, a chickadee’s song suddenly burst from the snow-covered spiaria bushes next to the house, clearly out of place in the dark and cold winter evening. I paused, listening, thinking its song was as topsy turvy as the conversation in the house I’d just left.
1929 Terrible. I’ve been horrible sick for days. Dr. B. helped. Weak as a rag. Can’t eat yet. Mrs. B. said she’s not going to “wait on me” anymore. I wish Mother was here. Vince has NOT returned my money. Awful blue and low.
Mae got rid of three for me. Read More