Bare Root Review::Fall 2007

He sits in his wheelchair, greasy gray hair plastered over to the side, eyes watery and unfocused, mouth slack. His family eddies and flows around him. His children act as if he isn’t there; his great-grandkids climb up and over him or give his chair an idle push. It is hard to believe this man was the scariest person of my teenage years.

When I was twelve, I met Lewie. (Her last name was Lewison.) Her real name was Jeannie, but I never called her that, still don’t. I had heard there were new kids on the other side of town; in a town of four hundred, news like that gets around fast. Actually, I had heard that a movie star had moved in with her family. That was the first thing I said to her.

“Your mom is a movie star?”

“No. She just sings with her band.” She replied nonchalantly, like every one had a mom that had talent enough to be on stage. Her mom sang with her own country western band, Karla and the El Dorados. She was brown-eyed beauty with a Loretta Lynn-like bouffant hairdo and a voice like Patsy Cline, a real belt-‘em-out-over-the-honky-tonk- noise kind of voice. She had a good sense of humor and could play several instruments by ear including the accordion. She let us have popcorn for dinner on lazy fall Sundays when her husband, Ernie, had to work extra hours because of harvest.

I have to admit I was dazzled at first but the friendship developed for more normal reasons; the ones that have been bringing girls together since time began: boys, make-up and… boys. We became a pair—where you saw one you saw the other. She was taller than I was, with the darkest brown eyes and blonde hair. We were both chubby and waiting for our swan selves to emerge. In the meantime, we did kid things; back then, kids were kids a lot longer than today. We played games outside until supper and then after dark we played hide-no-seek with the neighborhood kids, including a couple of boys we had crushes on (maybe we were more grown up than I thought). We had babysitting jobs with families that lived across the street from each other. We both had chores to do around the house since our mothers both worked out of the house. Cooking was one of them we had in common, and she invited me to her house one night for supper.

It wasn’t a house really. It was a trailer house, two-tone brown with crank out windows and the requisite rickety steps. It was all of fourteen feet wide, sixty feet long, and hadn’t seen new in a long, long time. She lived there with her parents, her two sisters, and her brother. She shared a room about the size of a walk in closet with her sisters, and her brother slept on the couch. The washing machine was in the bathroom. The whole place was so foreign to a kid that had grown up in a big, square, old house with a basement instead of wheels.

Karla also worked a regular job, just about every night during the week, at the bar downtown so the household chores were up to the kids. Lewie, as the oldest, was the cook.

“What are you making?” I asked as ingredients piled up on the counter.

“Tuna noodle hotdish,” she said as she swung a big pot of water onto a burner like she had done it her whole life. “Haven’t you ever had it?’

I hated to admit that we never ate anything more exotic than meat and potatoes and never mixed together.

“Uh. Maybe.” Trying to sound bored with the whole thing.

“Well, help me; my dad will be home soon.”

In the next forty-five minutes, I got a crash course in a kitchen so small two steps in any direction almost took you out of it. She had just gotten to the part where “you add peas, then…”

The door crashed open. Lewie’s dad tripped over the threshold, swore, and slammed the door shut.

“Supper ready yet?” He was covered in some sort of dust, wearing a grey uniform with “Ernie” embroidered over his heart and “Sunshine Elevator” across his back. He wore a matching gray hat low over his eyes making them hard to read.

“Just about,” Lewie said. “If you want to wash up…”

“You just worry about getting supper on the table,” he said. Too loudly I thought.

The dynamics in the room changed the way the air changes before a storm. A bad thing had snuck in with Lewie’s dad. Everyone moved with more purpose. Once the table was set, the other kids seemed to fade away. I know they were there but they were less substantial somehow.

Ernie came back in from washing up and dropped all two hundred and fifty-some pounds into a chair at the table.

“Take my boots off, boy.”

Louie’s slim, quiet, nine year old brother, Jim, jumped to it.

Lewie and I were busy finishing things up, working together like we had cooked at the same stove for years. I didn’t understand the urgency but I felt it course through me. I stared at the bright green peas, studding the grey gooey concoction, not knowing what to do. In no time, Lewie slipped a plate full of hotdish, two buttered slices of bread, and a steaming cup of coffee in front of her dad before he had a chance to bark any more orders.

She turned to me and gestured, “Dad this is...”

“That damned Warnke kid.” He glared at me from under his hat brim with the same dark brown eyes that all his children had. Then, as if he could sense my disapproval of his eating with his hat on, he ripped his hat from his head and flipped it at me. It caught me on the bridge of the nose, making my eyes water. I tried to act like men threw hats at me everyday. I could sense Lewie looking at me but I couldn’t look at her. I was so surprised by her father’s actions I was afraid I’d cry if she looked at all sympathetic, and if she didn’t look sympathetic, I would have cried twice as hard.

It was strange, us five children silent and still, watching Ernie wolf down his food. He set to as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks, and the only noise was his chewing, slurping, and heavy breathing. We didn’t eat with him; maybe because the table, sized to fit the room, was too small. Maybe we weren’t allowed to. Either way, I don’t remember eating at all that night, but we must have, after Ernie finished.

It sure was a contrast with my family that ate every supper together in our roomy (at least compared to theirs) square kitchen every night at six sharp. Children were to be seen, not heard; parents talked about their day. I might have cooked it and served it by myself, but we always ate it all together. Through the years, I learned the real challenge of cooking at Lewie’s house was timing. It had to ready when Ernie was, and not ready too long before he was. And Lewie became a master of timing.

Lewie and I never talked about why her dad was the way he was. There was no question of me talking to my parents about it. I didn’t want anything to wreck our friendship, and my ‘kid’s intuition’ told me they would stop letting us hang out together. Lewie’s home and family were something I didn’t want to give up; it was like having three more sisters and a brother younger than me. The ‘bad thing’ didn’t stop our friendship; in an inexplicable way it made it stronger.

One night, later that year, we had a sleep over at her house. Her sisters, J. D. and Sally, were gone and we had the bedroom to ourselves. We had already done the make-up thing and the hair thing and were lying in bed giggling about nothing when we heard the front door slam

“It’s my dad,” Lewie whispered.

We lay there in the dark listening to him bump against things and curse. In a trailer so small, it sounded like he was in the same room as us. We giggled at an especially big thump, and then we could hear his steps down the hall. Bert put her hand over my mouth and in dim light, I could see her shake her head. We lay still as his steps passed by to the bathroom.

“He doesn’t need to know we’re awake,” she whispered. “Listen.”

I lay there in the dark straining to hear what she wanted me to hear. I was just beginning to think she was teasing me when I heard, “Sh-h-hlurp,” coming from the bathroom. Before I had time to think, the whole bed started to shake with Lewie’s suppressed laughter. She couldn’t even whisper she was giggling so hard. In a house that flimsy, one had to learn to laugh on the inside. I was mystified and a little scared by the same slurping noise that came about every thirty seconds or so. Finally, she composed herself enough to tell me what was so funny.

“He’s drunk and he’s sitting on the toilet sucking peanuts out of their shells and eating them.”

This revelation was punctuated by a particularly loud slurp. It set us both off and we shoved the sheet into our mouths to stifle our laughs. We listened for what seemed like an eternity, giggling and imitating the noise quietly; then the toilet flushed interrupting us. In that trailer, there was no room for privacy or modesty so we could hear her dad pull up his pants, getting ready to leave the bathroom. The change in Lewie was immediate and disturbing.

“Close your eyes,” she whispered. “And no matter what, don’t open them. Pretend you’re sleeping.”

I had no time for questions and screwed my eyes shut tight, my breath trapped in my lungs. I could hear Ernie rounding the doorway of Lewie’s room. He stood there breathing noisily. I thought I heard him mumble ‘Warnke’ something and at the same time Lewie’s hand found mine under the covers and squeezed a warning or maybe it was just to give me confidence, either way I finally let my breath out. The little squeeze became painful and I realized this was the moment that what ever the bad thing was, it was going to happen then if at all.

I found the God that before only lived in Sunday school and called on him with all my being to keep the bad thing away. Through my lashes, I could see Ernie swaying next to the bed. I wanted to run away, screaming into the night back to my own boring, but safe family. God finally answered my pleadings; Ernie swung around, nearly overbalancing into the closet and bounced his way from wall to wall to the master bedroom.

“Sh-h-hlurp.” Came from the pillow next to mine. We fell asleep giggling softly, her hand still holding mine.

Once she told me a story about when they were little. Ernie had brought home a bushel of apples from one of his feed customers. They were pretty poor so they didn’t waste much. Lewie’s mom had ‘played’ the night before so Ernie and she were sleeping late. Her band played within a hundred mile radius, so they got home pretty late sometimes. The kids, ranging in age from five to two, got the brilliant idea to take just one bite out of each apple and pitch it across the room. They were laughing and having a great time until Ernie woke up because of the ruckus they were causing.

He came from the bedroom, pissed off. He disappeared outside for a moment and returned with a two by four.

“Pick them apples up,” he said, and every time they bent over, he hit them with the two by four.

“We couldn’t hardly sit down for a week,” she said. “But it was so damn fun taking a bite and throwing them.”

She laughed when she told the story, so did I. Her laugh didn’t bother me then, since I thought Ernie was the one getting the worst of it, since the apples were his. I was sure she didn’t really mean they could hardly sit down for a week that was just something kids said. I didn’t make the connection between this story and the peanut eating night. At times, I had thought about the ‘bad thing’ that came in with Ernie that night. I wondered if it was the scariness dads were capable of when they were mad. My dad could smack us pretty hard if we misbehaved, but Ernie seemed ready to smack anyone that night, reason be damned. In retrospect, I realize the source of the ‘bad thing’ I could always feel when Ernie was around, was anger--deserved or not.

We stayed friends all through high school. My parents gave me lots of rules and hers, practically none. We learned how to drink and dance and smoke and drive around and throw up at the end of a long drunk night. I still hung around their house even after I grew up and understood that Ernie was not only a drunk, he was an A #1 alcoholic, the kind that never missed a day of work but drank himself into oblivion every night. I’m still not sure if it was the lure of having ‘adopted’ siblings or if I just wanted to be a part of the tight little group that was made even tighter as a defense against Ernie.

Lewie never told me anything else that would explain the ‘bad thing”, her little sister Sally did, after we were all out of high school. She was the one that told me of the beatings, the panicked leavings—Karla and the kids sleeping in the car alongside the road to escape. One by one, the kids each escaped, by leaving home and sometimes by hitting the bottle themselves. She explained why J. D., the quiet, shy, middle sister (unless she’s had a few drinks) and she lived at home for so long. It was to protect their mom. They were too afraid of what Ernie might do to her with no one there to see.

When Ernie was finally forced into inpatient treatment, Karla kicked him out; family counseling revealed that the other siblings saw things differently than Lewie.

“Lewie lived with June and Ward Cleaver and the rest of us lived the Nightmare on Elm Street.” Sally said, explaining why Lewie had never told me what was really going on. It explained why she laughed at the two by four story as she told it. In a weird way, it was self preservation, to laugh it off. If it was funny, it could be put away, the horror distanced by comedy. It explained the bad thing I had always waited for when Ernie was around at night and it explained the feeling of jubilation and fun when Karla took Ernie with her to gigs and stayed away for the night. There was nothing in the dark that was a scary as their own dad.

Now that I look back at the distance of thirty some years and a couple of children of my own, I see how she escaped into marriage with a family the complete opposite of her own. I say family because I think she wanted to forget her past and believe it to be the same as her husband’s--normal, all American--so she married the whole package. She didn’t abandon her family; she just refashioned the past, at least on the surface. Once she left, she didn’t have to face what was happening and it receded, even though her mom and sisters fought it for years after. This doesn’t make her bad, it makes her human. We all have different levels of tolerance--less painful ways of remembering.

I was lucky enough to become part of the ‘country western star’s’ family. Even though fear settled around my heart when Ernie came home, I spent a lot of time with this bunch of funny, kind, and loyal kids. We still have strong ties. Every once in a while our schedules all match and we spend an evening laughing. Sally jokingly calls me one of the Lewison girls. And I’m proud to know I belong. It isn’t that I want a new family, it’s that I feel I’ve earned a place in theirs.

It is the morning after the wedding of Lewie’s oldest daughter. The whole family made it, Ernie just barely, having been hospitalized for the week before with bleeding ulcers. He has diabetes and high blood pressure and he has had a stroke. He still drinks, usually just the two drinks a day his doctor allows him. Each contains a twenty-ounce Pepsi and at least a half a pint of whiskey. Obviously, he didn’t specify how big the drinks could be. The doctors don’t know what keeps him alive but I’m pretty sure it’s orneriness. Karla is safe from him now. He falls a lot and trying to take a good swing would topple him easily.

I am sitting across the table from him in the motel breakfast room, finishing my breakfast, watching his children interact with him. Or maybe not interact with him is more accurate. His wheelchair, and him in it, could be just another piece of furniture. His grandchildren chatter away to him, though. (They don’t know anything about the bad thing, and I don’t think anyone plans on telling them.) His great-grandson is climbing up the wheel of his chair, grinning an almost toothless grin. His little hand grabs a fistful of skin on Ernies’s forearm and he hauls himself into his great-grandpa’s lap with a fleshy thump. For a moment, I hear a slurping sound and feel the cool breath of the bad thing again. I look up into his eyes and he smiles.