Margaret Anne was often reminded of how her life used to be and sometimes it was okay, sometimes it wasn’t. Thinking, or dreaming about her best friend growing up for instance, was okay, though why, after all these years, the friend would appear in a dream, or even in her mind in passing, was a puzzlement. But it didn’t break her heart, as it might have if her friend’s family had been her own.
Jeannie’s mother, Vi, and her father Max were foreign figures to Margaret Anne even in appearance. Unlike her own family in all ways. Vi was literally tiny, short, thin and dark, while Max was big, tall and raw-boned. Jeannie on the other hand, unlike her mother, was tall and blond, big boned like her father. Then there was Vi’s brother Ollie, the town bum who walked the beaches of Lake Huron a block from the house Max had built for his family long before Margaret Anne knew Jeannie.
Ollie, as she remembered, had been in World War I and must have had a small pension because for the first couple of weeks each month he disappeared into Greeka’s Tavern located perhaps ten blocks from Jeannie’s house where Ollie lived at the back in a small addition Max had added on just for him. A small, pot-bellied stove centered the small space, providing all the heat and warmth he needed. And Vi, his sister, brought him food, although Max was firmly against it.
“Ollie should buy his own vittles with his money instead of drinking it all away,” Max often stated in a loud voice, as if that was the end of it, but it didn’t stop his wife from taking food to her brother.
Picking up Jeannie on her way to school all week, they would pass Ollie’s door as they cut through her friend’s back yard and sometimes he would greet them, other times the door was tightly shut. He wore baggy trousers and an old jacket with a crushed Fedora always on his head. So his lonely figure trudging slowly along the nearby Lake Huron beach was easily recognizable even from a distance, his little rusty red wagon squeaking along behind him filled with driftwood he collected for his stove.
Sometimes he left wood for Vi because in the early years that Jeannie and Margaret Anne were friends, the main house too was heated by a pot belly stove located in the center of their linoleum-floored front room. The kitchen was heated by a huge, black-iron, wood-burning stove that always seemed to take forever to heat up so Vi could have her cracked, white enamel mug of tea in the morning before braiding Jeannie’s hair, often making her late for school as Margaret Anne hurried ahead knowing her parents would not understand any late marks on her report card.
Jeannie was the youngest of Vi and Max’s five children and this was where being part of that family would have grieved Margaret Anne because they paid little attention to their youngest. Except for the routine of getting her off to school, there was no sense of order in her friend’s life. Where Margaret Anne’s life was rigid and disciplined, Jeannie’s was catch-as-catch-can. Still, somehow, it wasn’t as boring as Margaret Anne’s was because unless she did something they didn’t like, her parents and two siblings paid her little mind either. They were a family in the sense that they were related and lived according to their parents’ rigid rules, otherwise there was no sense of togetherness, of personal loving and caring. Her life was filled with church, school and community activities and Margaret Anne’s needy mother “ruled the roost.” Her father, on the other hand, was always receptive to his children, but his wife was his main concern at home…keeping her “happy” or, at the very least, not upset about something.
Harold, Jeannie’s oldest brother was tall and handsome, had been in the Army during World War II and was dishonorably discharged for working the black market. He later married a Kelly girl…a secretary…and eventually settled in Cleveland after a short visit home to introduce his tall, beautiful new wife to his family.
Edward, the second son, had been a talented artist and when one of his teachers sent some of his work to an art school in New York City, he was subsequently offered a scholarship out of high school. Instead he joined the Army, disappearing into the far Northwest afterward where he married and had four children. Later, long after Margaret Anne had left home to live and work in Washington, D.C., he left his family, came home and took up residence in Ollie’s old quarters, fixed up by Max after Ollie moved to the “Poor Farm” on the outskirts of town, at Max’s insistence.
Edward took Ollie’s place as the toothless town bum, but with no pension, so Max had to support him. But, since Edward was his son, his own flesh and blood, Max never complained about this and besides, he and Vi liked to keep their family as close to home as they could, never turned any of them away no matter what.
Then there was Ardis, Jeannie’s third sibling, the oldest daughter who married into a well-to-do family in a nearby town during World War II. She had three children close together, but while her husband was away in the service during World War II he met another woman and divorced Ardis, forcing her to go to work for the local telephone company, leaving her young children in the care of a nearby aunt. After the war she met Sam and although she wasn’t in love with him, according to Jeannie, he was well off and cared about her and her children, so she married him. They had a child together but a year after she was born she died of some fever and the couple never got over it.
The forth child, Doris, was five years older then Jeannie and ran off with a sailor when she was 17. Then, a year later she came home with a baby boy, having left her sailor husband for reasons that were never clear. So Max and Vi supported her and the boy for three years, all of them becoming totally attached to the child, even Margaret Anne.
Then one day the sailor reappeared and again, without explanation, Doris took the boy and left, without explanation, not even telling her family she was leaving or where they were going. All they knew was that the sailor was from somewhere in Illinois.
Finally there was Jeannie, the fifth and youngest, who was always more popular with the boys then Margaret Anne. They were both tall and both shy around boys, but Jeannie had a naturally flirtatious way about her that Margaret Anne did not have. However, by their senior year Margaret Anne had found a niche as the secretary in the high school principal’s office, a job that had first been given to Jeannie, who had better grades then Margaret Anne without even trying. Margaret Anne was a dreamer who spent most of her alone time making up stories, fantasizing and day dreaming when she should have been studying, whereas Jeannie, like all her siblings, was just naturally smart, picked up her studies quickly and easily, but never seemed to care one way or the other, nor did her parents.
“Max Valle is an artist at tool making and designing,” Margaret Anne’s father said once. But the parents had no ambition for their children, just wanted to keep them close to home, forever if possible.
After a run-in with the high school principal that was never explained, Jeannie left the secretarial job in a huff, with all it’s little senior perks, like being able to come and go at will because of working in “the office.” Margaret Anne got the job by default and blossomed with the authority and responsibility it allowed her, giving her a sense of value for the first time in her young life.
By then Jeannie and Margaret Anne were hanging around with a couple of other girls, which suited Margaret Anne because she was beginning to feel dragged down by the responsibility she felt toward her old friend. Through the years she had cajoled and included Jeannie in all her own forced activities, especially church. Jeannie’s father was a lapsed Catholic and her mother a fallen-away Lutheran, so it fell to Margaret Anne to include Jeannie in her de rigueur Presbyterian activities. Jeannie was sometimes reluctant, but invariably came around.
Early in their senior year they both sent off queries to the FBI for jobs in Washington, D.C. after learning about them from another girl who had gone off to work there the previous year. That winter an FBI agent came to the local city hall and gave them a test, then they waited to hear, and waited. Margaret Anne finally received a post card telling her where and when to report but Jeannie never did hear. Margaret Anne was secretly relieved to be on her own for the first time ever—no more feeling responsible for Jeannie.
A year after travelling to Washington to work for the vaunted FBI, Margaret Anne returned home to attend a State College with Jeannie as they had planned. But once at the college, Margaret Anne talked her friend into flying back to Washington with her where she had left a new boy friend and a kind of freedom that was not offered at home or the college where there was an eleven o’clock curfew for all the students who lived in dorms. This curtailment of personal freedom seemed like prison to Margaret Anne after the freedom of being on her own, having her own job and her own money in the beautiful Capital city. And Jeannie was more then happy to go along, thus bringing with her the old sense of responsibility Margaret Anne always felt toward her old friend.
It lasted a year. The two girls easily got jobs with the Department of the Army in the Pentagon, moved back into the boarding house where Margaret Anne had been assigned by the FBI, and soon they were commuting to work together. Not so different really from Margaret Anne picking Jeannie up on the way to school in earlier days.
But now Margaret Anne had an off-and-on boyfriend she was crazy about, so Jeannie began going out with some of the other working girls in the boarding house. Thus it was inevitable that she would meet somebody and fall in love. He was a soldier stationed in D.C., lucky not to have been sent to Korea…yet.
“We’re getting married,” Jeannie told Margaret Anne one night after returning from a date with him. They had known each other a little more then a month and Jeannie was on a cloud, glowing with the excitement and happiness of it all. Margaret Anne had met him once, a tall, brown-haired, nice looking young man with a mischievous smile.
“He’s going home on leave next weekend to tell his parents,” Jeannie continued, and while Margaret Anne was happy for her, she was also a little jealous as her own now two-year relationship seemed to be going nowhere.
Two weeks later, however, she came home from a movie date to find Jeannie in their shared bedroom in tears and packing.
“His girlfriend from before he went into the Army is pregnant and he has to marry her. Their families are old friends and he has no choice,” Jeannie sobbed, throwing clothes into a suit case.
“But where are you going? Aren’t you going to give notice at work?”
“I’m going home, that’s it,” she said, and that very night she took a Greyhound bus back to Michigan. “I’ll just go back to my old job at the radio station and the boyfriend I was trying to get away from,” she added, then she was gone.
“Big mistake,” she wrote Margaret Anne eight months later. “I’m six months pregnant and when I told him over burgers at our local hangout, he told me that he’d been trapped that way once before by a girlfriend he’d had to marry and it wasn’t going to happen again. Next day he was gone, left his job at the radio station without notice and disappeared. My brother Harold tried to find him but couldn’t, so I’m on my own.”
She had the baby three months later and named her Carla, after the father. Meanwhile, the minister in Margaret Anne’s parents’ church tried to talk her into putting the baby up for adoption, but Jeannie and her parents would have none of it.
That summer Margaret Anne went home on vacation and was godmother to the girl who was baptized in their Presbyterian Church, but that was the last time she saw the child or Jeannie. Later she heard from a mutual friend that Jeannie got a job with the local newspaper. Her parents took care of the baby and after a while she met a part-time musician and a sailor on one of the Great Lakes freighters. He came from a large, local Polish family so Vi and Max approved. Jeannie turned Catholic and they were married in the local Catholic Church where his family were all members.
He was a tall, handsome man Margaret Anne was told by the mutual friend, and he quickly took to Carla, disciplining her as he saw fit, or so the friend said. “I guess Jeannie doesn’t mind him doing that, which is funny, because you know Jeannie, she was never inclined to be disciplined herself. Guess she just wanted somebody to take charge, and he did,” the friend said.
The couple proceeded to have four children together and eventually moved to a nearby town where he had relatives and a regular gig in some bar between sailing stints. Then one day, at the age of forty, he dropped dead of a heart attack.
“I never heard anything more from her after that,” the mutual friend told Margaret Anne. “One of his relatives told me that Jeannie had become a recluse. She never responded to any of our class reunion notifications so I guess it must be true.”
• • •
All this came back to Margaret Anne after a dream she had about this old and once loved friend. So much water under the bridge she thought as the years of her life disappeared into the now of her seventies and the odd assignment she had allowed herself to take on in a moment of weakness. Or maybe it was in a moment of boredom because all the doing and going and loving, the friends, the writing and family excitement of her middle and later years had ended with her husband’s death after 45 years of marriage.
Her children were off living their lives, her beloved husband was gone, and her own work of choice—writing—had lost its momentum. In fact, she had lost her focus, her equilibrium as it once was and now was no more. Not that she believed this published interview was going to change or fix anything. Clearly her time had come and gone and she was never going to return to that fullness of experience she had once known. But, for just a moment in time here, there was a raison d’être. After all, life was just that, right now, this moment.
“Enjoy it,” she said out loud.
• • •
He was a creature of the dark, came to love it as the hiding place he was always seeking, and frequently finding, fulfilling his preference for not being seen or found.
For a while after he went to work for his uncle, he let his bushy dark hair grow until it reached his collar. But he didn’t like the looks he got from people, didn’t like the attention it seemed to provoke, perhaps because it was curly, bushy and unmanageable. So eventually he cut it off, deciding instead to have a tattoo on his upper left arm of a green bow and red arrow, reminding him of his cowboy and Indian days as a boy in the trees and shrubs surrounding and filling his grandparents’ huge yard, parts of which they eventually sold because the upkeep, or lack of it, caused their neighbors to complain to the county, calling it an eye sore. But, by then his interests had changed.