Workshopping My Memoir

After having a week to read and digest each other's memoirs for my Creative Writing class that I enrolled in this semester, my classmates and I arranged our desks into a circle to critique them, or "workshop" them as the instructor calls it. Perhaps because mine was the longest, it was the first to go under the scalpel. My classmates gave me some great feedback on the seven-page "beginning" to what I have every intention of developing into a book. It's been a fascinating process, going back to my childhood and re-living, sometimes vividly, certain days, moments and emotions. I'm so grateful to have had this opportunity that opened the door to something I've wanted to do for decades -- to write a book about my life. I look forward to the adventure of completing my story, and I am honored to share the beginning of my story with you.

Cookie (Working Title)

I was 13 years old when my mother called from Michigan one day to tell us she had just gotten married. My three sisters and I took turns on the phone. She told each of us that we would be moving shortly after she and her new husband returned home to Wisconsin.

It was fall of 1970. We had lived in the small lakeside town of Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for just four years. I'd spent the first ten years of my life scampering the open meadows and wooded hideouts of a small landlocked neighborhood several miles away called the Delavan Inlet before moving in to the old Victorian house in Williams Bay that my grandparents purchased. The house had been converted into a two-flat, and my parents and sisters and I lived in the spacious downstairs level, and my grand parents lived in their own apartment upstairs. There were only two bedrooms so my sisters and I all piled into one room and my parents slept in what was once a formal dining room that they separated from the living room with a folding partition.

Still, moving from our tiny, one-story, one bathroom house in the Inlet, to the stately, gleaming white two-story home that boasted a full-length porch with big round pillars, two large out-buildings and a quaint pair of rental cabins in back, and having my grandparents living right above me to boot, was like landing in heaven .

The day we moved in my grandmother told us that because we lived in the city now we wouldn't be able to talk "at the top of our lungs" to each other like we used to in the Inlet, so she took all four of us to one of the big barn-like sheds in back, closed the door and told us to holler as loud as we could for as long as we could in order to "get it out of our systems." There we were, my three sisters and me screeching up a storm in the dusty old shed until we were hoarse. When we came out I heard the most beautiful sounds filling up the air I'd ever heard. I asked my grandmother what it was and she told me they were chimes coming from a nearby church. The distant bells played on. I recognized the melody they played and sang along:

On a hill far away

Stood an old rugged cross,

The emblem of suffering and shame,

And I love that old cross,

Where the dearest and best,

A world of lost sinners was slain.

And I'll cherish the old rugged cross,

Till my trophies at last I lay down,

And I'll cling to the old rugged cross,

And exchange it some day for a crown.

My older sister, Candi, and I had once stood near the altar one Sunday morning at church and had nervously sung that hymn in front of the congregation. Any lingering reservations I might have had about my new home seemed to float off into the air on the notes of those gentle chimes on that still, spring afternoon.

I turned 11 a few weeks after we moved to Williams Bay. My father got a job with the new Chrysler factory in Illinois and my mother quit her job at the fabrics factory. We didn't know it then, but we would have not quite one year of what would feel like an ordinary life -- my sisters and I walking to school everyday, coming home for lunch, trudging up the big curved wooden staircase every night to kiss grandma and grandpa good night and sneak a piece of candy.

That following spring after we moved to the Bay, my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I had come home for lunch that day. My grandparents always used their own entrance to their flat at the front of the house. This day, though, as I sat at the kitchen table eating my lunch, I thought it strange to see my grandmother walk into the kitchen through our side door. She didn't seem to notice me. My grandfather followed behind, walking slowly, looking down. My mother came into the kitchen and saw my grandmother. They locked eyes for a brief moment. My grandmother then turned slightly, put both her hands on the kitchen sink as if to steady herself and hunched over the sink. They had just come from the doctor. My mother put her arm around my grandmother's shoulder. "What's the matter, ma?" my mother said. My grandmother shook her head and didn't speak, her shoulders shaking. She didn't know how to tell her only daughter she was dying.

Because my grandfather had retired and my grandparents' insurance had run out, it was decided that my grandmother come home from the hospital to die at home. Candi and I would take turns in the evenings sitting outside her bedroom at the kitchen table, doing our home work and "listening" for her. We were told summon grandpa or my mother if grandma called out or if we heard her start to choke. Mostly she just slept. My grandfather sat in the living room down the hall watching T.V. My mother was downstairs. My father was working the 2^nd shift.

One day the following March I came home from school and the intercom that had been set up between my grandmother's bedroom and our living room so that we could hear my grandmother was turned off -- the constant low buzzing sound it gave off which we had become accustomed to was now silent, and in its place was the stark silence that told me instantly that my grandmother had died.

Within a few months my father would be gone from the house, too -- it turned out that while my mother had been caring for grandma, my father had taken up with a woman he worked with at the plant. My mother found out about the affair after my father received a get well card and letter in the mail after he'd undergone hemorrhoid surgery. My father didn't get much sympathy from my mother during the weeks he sat recuperating on an inflatable inner tube. After he recovered he moved to an apartment in Illinois. For months after he moved out he would call and ask to talk to my mother and would often break down crying. But by then my mother had had her fill of his self-centeredness and his drinking. Besides, she had begun a romance of her own with an Iranian man, named Chan, whom she'd met while working as a cocktail waitress a local resort. He was a kind and cheerful man, but for some reason I was timid of him. He knew this and so whenever he came to our house he would make a game of it, and with a big smile he would wiggle his finger towards himself and command in a deep voice with his thick Middle East accent, "Come heeere Koo-kie!" (Cookie was my nickname.) I would stand in the doorway and shake my head or turn and run away and he would always throw his head back and roar with laughter.

After my mother began to suspect that Chan was using their relationship in an effort to extend his travel visa in the United States, the romance ended and he returned to Iran. And after my father realized his children were going to be of no use in helping to get my mother back, he stopped calling. Occasionally he would call and tell us he was coming to visit, but most of the time he never showed up so we stopped waiting for him.

Candi and I looked out for our younger sisters, Julie and Jill, while my mother worked second shift. My grandfather kept to himself upstairs for the most part after my grandmother died. One day he came downstairs and walked into the kitchen, weaving back and forth on his feet. He wore a face I didn't recognize.

"Hiya, Cook," he said. His voice didn't sound the way it usually did. He started coming downstairs more often, slurring his words when he spoke to us. Sometimes he'd let out an eerie, high-pitched laugh. When Candi and I discovered empty beer cans in the garbage bins out back we started to put two and two together. But when we told our mother that we thought Gramps was drinking, she told us we were crazy, that Gramps had stopped drinking 30 years ago after grandma had threatened to leave him. (Years later my mother would tell us that she knew Gramps had started drinking again, but she didn't want to admit it to us.)

Not long after Chan returned to Iran, my mother met a man at a horse-betting

track in Illinois. His name was Bob. He drove a fancy Cadillac, threw money

around at the horse track, and bragged to my mother that he owned a boat. Coincidentally the boat just happened to be docked in the harbor at the same resort where my mother worked. Bob was a decade older than my mother, had thinning hair that he combed straight back and bore a striking resemblance to Richard Nixon. He had a big, meaty nose and saggy jowls. He seemed to always be impatiently expelling air from his large nostrils. He smoked a lot and drank brandy in the evenings

When my mother told Gramps that she had married Bob and was planning to move away with her new husband, he tried get her to change her mind, even offering to sign over the deed to the house to her, but she said no. She had decided to go wherever Bob wanted to go.

Bob had decided we would move to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We would later find out that that decision was based on Bob's need to hide out from some unsavory characters he had been involved with while he was living in Rockford, Illinois -- and that the Mafia had contract out on his life over some gambling debts. That would explain the pistol Bob kept hidden in his dresser that Candi and I found while snooping around one day. We would also later find out that my mother and Bob were never really married -- my mother had made up the whole story because she knew Gramps wouldn't approve of her living with a man she wasn't married to. And my mother would find out shortly after moving to the U.P. that the Cadillac and the boat were both rented, and that Bob didn't have any money at all.

The day we left Williams Bay was like a bad dream that I couldn't shake. I'd only had less than a month to prepare to leave the friends who had seen me through the death of my grandmother, my parent's divorce, and my grandfather's gradual descent into the bottle. Not to mention by then my older sister and I both had boyfriends. The entire school threw Candi and I a going away party. My class took up a collection and gave me an engraved locket as a going away present.

It was late November. Me and my sisters and our collie, Shadow, squeezed into my mother's white Rambler that she'd plastered with big '70's flower decals to cover up a half dozen gaping rust spots, to make the 350 mile trip to the tiny hamlet of Harris in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, located on the western edge of the Chippewa Indian reservation.

Our new home was situated a few feet back from the main highway of U.S. 41 that cuts straight up through the U.P. The two-story converted duplex had once been the local grocery store. Across the highway was the railroad track that carried the Soo Line freight train past our apartment twice a day. The closest house was a farm located a mile south. Aside from that, there was nothing else but trees for miles on end. My sister and I took a walk to smoke a cigarette and decided we would run away the first chance we got.

By dinnertime on our first day in Harris, if any of us four girls had dared to harbor even the flimsiest fantasy about what our new lives would be like with the man we knew as our step-father, they would soon be quashed faster than the time it took to unpack a suitcase. That evening my mother, Bob, and my three sisters and I sat down in our dining room for our first meal together. Bob sat at one end of the table to my right, my mother sat at the other end on my left. My sisters and I sat two and two across from each other. The long drive and our young nerves must have gotten the better of us, and right off the bat, as would often happen when all four of us were seated together with food in front of us, we were struck with the giggles. Before long not one of us could catch the eye of the other without trying to squelch a violent, quivering snort.

Suddenly I heard a loud bang! I felt the table quiver..

My sisters and I all turned our heads in unison in our step-father's direction. His face was red and his eyes flashed quickly from one of us to the other. He then slowly lifted the fist he had used to hit the table and unfurled his index finger.

"I just want to tell you all one thing," he said, air spewing from his nostrils like a breathless dragon, stabbing the air with his index finger as he pointed first at one side of the table where my younger sisters sat, then at Candi and I. "I can't stand any of you!" he sneered, waving his hand inclusively at us with a smirk of contempt, leaning back slightly into his chair.

"The only reason you're sitting at this table is because of that lady right there," he glowered, pointing at my mother.

Our eyes followed his finger to my mother. She made no eye contact with us -- her face was expressionless, like that of an obedient child, only more hopeless.

"If it wasn't for her, you wouldn't be sitting here," he huffed.

I looked across the table at my younger sisters, the laughter having vanished from their eyes, replaced now with fear and something that looked like embarrassment mixed with confusion.

Bob then stood up abruptly and left the table.

The following month Candi and I made good on our decision to run away. We hopped a Greyhound bus early one morning in Escanaba when we were supposed to be at school and bought a one-way ticket back to Williams Bay, back to our old house where Gramps was waiting for us. My mother had called him right after our sisters squealed on us. He told us the first thing we had to do was call our mother, who promptly grounded us. "You're nothing but a couple of inconsiderate little bitches!" she snarled into the phone. But even though she grounded us, Gramps didn't have the heart to keep us home and let us go to the basketball game up at the high school to see our friends.

By this time Candi was 17 years old. It occurred to her that she could get out of the grounding and having to return to Michigan altogether if she and her high school sweetheart simply got married. She started planning her wedding, and several days later I returned to face the wrath of my mother and Bob alone.

To Be Continued...