Vanity Insanity (9 page)

“I can’t call my house because my brothers would just tease me and my mom and dad would think that I couldn’t handle baby-sitting. Every sound I hear…it’s like I think someone is watching me. Can you come to the back door? I don’t want anyone to know that you’re coming over…Oh, my gosh, what was that?”

Lucy couldn’t hear my smile over the phone. I told her I’d meet her at the back door in sixty seconds. Once I got to the door, I saw the silhouette of Lucy in the doorway. Behind her every light in the house appeared to be on. She could still hear if the twins woke up, but she didn’t want me to come in just in the event that the Shanahans got home. I felt so sneaky. I guess there were some kids in Omaha our age who were doing some sneaking around. Maybe they were having fun.

For the next hour, until we heard the Shanahans drive up, I kept Lucy company on the back porch. Did she really think that I could protect her from a trio of thugs while they searched for a heroin-stuffed doll? I guess she just felt a little safer for the moment.

The radio from the countertop in Mrs. Shanahan’s kitchen was on a low volume, and I could hear Casey Kasem announce the top forty songs of the week with little stories of dedication tucked in between the hits. “This next song is a dedication from Nancy Anderson of Evanston, Indiana. Nancy met a boy years ago at a Bible camp in Illinois and has since lost touch. That boy was never forgotten. Nancy said that the two weeks she spent with Christopher were the best two weeks of her life. Tonight Nancy sends this next song out to that very special young man from Bible camp. Christopher, we hope you’re listening.”

Casey Kasem played the nauseating and extremely dumb song that had been played to overkill in 1975: Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

Lucy talked nonstop that night, I think to avoid sounds of drug dealers. “OK, so for all the stories about the Horror Hall, not an awful lot went on down there. We mostly just talked. Even though the boys are fun and interesting, I don’t like the dark, and I definitely do not like holding Joe Weller’s hand or the thought of kissing him.”

“But isn’t that the point?” I knew what I had heard in the roaming rumors about the Hall. “Whatever…Joe told Will who told Marty that if I didn’t kiss him soon, he’d break up with me. I’m OK with that. Mostly the Hall is something to do. Besides, I have my eye on one of Anthony’s friends from Prep. He makes me laugh, and he’s so cute.”

“And he’s in high school and you’re in sixth grade.”

“Tom Ducey.” She said his name like she was savoring a spoonful of ice cream.

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s from Saint Peter and Paul.” Like that mattered. “He’s this big, handsome South Omaha boy with awesome eyes.”

“Wow,” I said and smirked.

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Sometimes the Horror Hall feels like what death would feel like. Dark and scary. No, death could be worse than the Horror Hall. I wouldn’t know anybody in heaven. How fun could that be?”

“And no one would ask to hold your hand. It’s not like it’s a party…You’re dead. Maybe you’d make new friends.”

“Ben, I feel kind of stupid about getting so scared tonight…I know you won’t tell anyone.”

How did she know that?

Lucy stood alone in her admission to her presence in the Horror Hall. I doubt if Sister Annunciata could even threaten to take Confirmation away from Lucy for telling the truth. The principal held much-more-interesting punishments for those Horror Hall criminals. All by herself, Lucy did the time for her crime of admitting being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She served her sentence for three days, helping out the janitors who were cleaning up the mess in the classrooms that was left by the tornado.

Lucille Belle Mary Mangiamelli did “confirm” her Catholic faith later that year in what she called the ugliest tangerine dress, which Ava had insisted she wear. “I mean, really, who wears the color tangerine?” Lucy may have worn the dress, but she refused to wear her glasses that she had just gotten that year.

So, once again, from the top.

Sister Annunciata called seven kids to the office. All but one said that they had never been to the tornado shelter below the locker rooms. Later that day, a tornado visited Saint Pius X in the late afternoon. A month later, Sister Annunciata called Ava. Later that morning my sister went to Confession. I think. After that, my mother tried to do Ava’s hair but instead calmed the fear in her that her daughter might go to hell, or worse, not make her Confirmation. Right after that the phone rang. I dropped my spoon.

“Can somebody get that?” my mother yelled from the bottom of the stairs. I ran to the phone. No one was there. This time, someone saved me.

8

Grandpa Mac: A Trim, His Best Friend’s Funeral

Saturday, July 31

1976

A
little off the sides was all he ever wanted.

Mom and Grandpa Mac would always argue.

“You took off too much.”

“It’s not too much.”

“Just look at the floor, would ya? Look at all of my hair.”

Mom would wink at me as they argued. This Saturday seemed different as they verbally sparred, splitting hairs. While he threw in the usual grumbles and jabs, he seemed distracted; I noticed that Grandpa Mac didn’t have the usual sparkle in his blue eyes.

“Going fishing today, Grandpa?” I asked, hoping to reignite that sparkle.

“Not today, Benny. Not today. Got to bury my buddy Bill.”

“Bill the fighter pilot?’

“One and the same.” I thought I caught a slight sparkle.

“Wasn’t he the best man in your wedding with Grandma Margaret?” I knew this as a fact, but I also knew that Grandpa Mac loved to tell the stories of his life.

“Yep.”

No story today. His role as a pallbearer was imminent. Grandpa had been burying a good number of his buddies and their wives that year, and the weight of the dead was wearing him down a bit. He looked tired and alone. I thought it was funny he would worry about his hair looking nice. Heck, his friend was dead and didn’t care about hair anymore. It was more for respect, I guess. As my mother brushed the stray hairs from his collar, he got up and grabbed his hat.

Grandpa Mac had accomplished much in his life. Warren Alvin MacClintock had served his country during World War II. He married the love of his life at twenty, raised three daughters with her, and buried her too early—way too early, as he would say. He then married her best friend and spent another twenty years in marriage, only to bury another wife. He was sixty-five. He worked as a civil engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad for forty years, although he would just say “the railroad.” What other railroad is there? He taught me to salute a Union Pacific train whenever we stopped for one.

Grandpa Mac, with his blue eyes and well-developed laugh lines, would fill a room with what I found to be his most salient character trait, his strong, positive spirit in everything he did. If I introduced him to you at this very moment, I would bet my life savings that he would reach out to you with one of his calloused, honest hands to shake your hand while simultaneously patting it with his other calloused, honest hand. He would tilt his head and look straight into your heart with his blue eyes and say, “Hi, friend.” My life savings.

Mac ushered every Sunday 7:30 a.m. Mass of his adult life at Assumption Church down south of us. He was born to usher. No one was left standing at the back of his service. Two? He would quickly find a place for two and smile as he escorted you to your place to worship. He lived out west as
long as I knew him but continued to support the Czech parish in which he grew up in South Omaha. The Czech church was where Scottish Mac had learned all of the pre–Vatican II ropes, only to totter and sway through the sixties; eventually, he politely acknowledged the “changes” of the Church with his usual positive, though sometimes hesitant, spirit.

He shared with me, more than once, the story of poor Father Begley informing the many staunch Czech Catholics of Assumption—can you get more staunch than a Czech Catholic?—that the Mass would now include a new little ritual called the Sign of Peace. This “interruption” would take place following the Lord’s Prayer. During that time, the congregation members would turn to each other and shake hands or hug or kiss as an endearing, beautiful sign of peace to each other. This would probably have been better received in a touchy-feely Southern Baptist Community, but back in South Omaha in 1968, in a community that was quite content with showing peace without saying or demonstrating it, it was unsettling and, well, silly. Implications should carry more significance, right? You already know that I wish you peace; why should I have to be all goofy?

Father Begley had anticipated this Catholic indigestion as a result of some spicy little get-togethers held in Rome earlier that decade. He reassured the community that in time, this little added gesture would feel like a normal part of the Mass. Try telling that to Dorothy Skromak. She was offended by the overanxious Norma Antonelli—a few Italians had snuck into Assumption—who appeared to show too much peace to Dorothy’s husband, Joe. Her sign of peace came in the form of a shove and an elbow as poor Father Begley and Grandpa Mac, the usher, attempted to calm the waters. Peace came slowly to the Church in the sixties.

Mac shot me a tiny twinkle as he opened the door. “Have a good one, Benny.”

“You bet I will.” I lowered my voice a bit.

My mother mumbled as she grabbed her purse and patted the back of her hair, “I’ll lock up the outside door if you lock the one into the laundry room. Don’t forget to turn off the radio. If Mrs. Bittner calls, please tell her that I’ll reschedule. She was the only one I couldn’t get a hold of.”

I was in complete shock. My mother was closing Marcia’s Beauty Box on a Saturday. The quiet of the room had not hit me, as I’d been searching for Grandpa Mac’s sparkle. I’d missed the empty waiting area. Saturdays were her “meat” and the rest of the days were “potatoes.” My mother had never closed her salon on a Saturday before; in the world of hairdressers, Marcia Keller had just committed salon sacrilege.

“Mac needs me. Lock up,” Mom reminded me.

“You bet I will.” This time my voice squeaked.

I was an almost-fifteen-year-old sitting on a wobbly fence of torment. On the one hand, I knew I should feel sorrow for my grandfather. I should feel concern for my mother’s tight financial record for the next week. I should feel confusion about my mother walking into a Catholic church, when she had not stepped inside one since she cried over a torn and crumbled pile of annulment papers years ago. On the other hand, I felt the greatest joy in my selfish stomach as I leaped to leave the room, almost forgetting to silence Elton John singing “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” from the black radio. I had never been free this early on a Saturday since I could remember. After cleaning up after my mom’s last client, I would usually not get done until late afternoon.

What made my guilt even stronger was that the day was absolutely perfect. A perfect Saturday with endless possibilities. I thought I might just get on my ten-speed and cruise around the block to take in the concept. The guilt was starting to dissipate as I considered the day. Should I go to the pool? Maybe Will would want to ride down to Ben Franklin Five and Dime for a ton of junk food.

On my way out of the door, I grabbed a cold bottle of TaB. If Mom had been there, she would have looked at me disapprovingly and then looked away. No look today. I opened the bottle with a bottle opener and checked under the lid to see if I had won anything. I guess my luck went only so far. With a skip in my step, I headed out to the cul-de-sac after downing half of the TaB. Cool and refreshing, with a very nasty after-bite. I grabbed my transistor radio and turned it on. The song “Afternoon Delight” was playing. If Mom had been here, she would
have made me change the station, frowning at the risqué lyrics. I turned the song up.

I saw a clump of the neighbor guys with towels on their handlebars, heading to the pool: Will, Stinky, his little brother Andy, A.C., and Will’s older brother, Anthony, who never hung out with the younger kids. Will was pulling his bike out of Satch as I rode up to the group. “Satch,” short for Sasquatch, was the name we had given the gigantic evergreen tree in the front of the tiny little home of Louis and Ava Mangiamelli.

Satch was the kind of evergreen on which the lowest branches were poised just so that they covered about four feet of space beneath them, enough that a group of kids could use the underbrush as a fort. Don’t think we didn’t spend plenty of rainy afternoons under the gentle giant of a tree, planning and scheming about nothing and everything. I remember one noted afternoon under Satch, playing spin the bottle with most of the kids from the cul-de-sac. Lovey Webber had brought an empty Pepsi bottle from the Webber trash and dictated the diversion under the tree. She started by spinning the bottle until the mouth end pointed toward Stinky Morrow.

“Dare! I take the d-d-dare!”

“OK then.” Lovey batted her eyes. “I dare you to touch the Wicker Witch’s back door.”

Upon Lovey’s request or demand, Stinky raced about thirty feet to the Wicker Witch’s back door, touched it, and ran back, panting, narrowly escaping death. Stinky’s spin pointed toward me, and I squirmed at my options.

Truth meant I would risk the question that I couldn’t answer.
Why don’t you have a dad?
I doubted that Stinky would ask it, but I found a dare more enticing than the truth, so I went with that. Maybe Stinky would make me drink Pepsi on top of a mouth full of Pop Rocks to see if my head exploded. Better than the truth.

Stinky looked right at me and said, “B-b-ben, kiss Faith Webber.”

Kiss Faith? Out-of-my league Faith? If pleasure and panic can coexist, they did in my stomach that afternoon. Everyone laughed at the look on
my face until Faith said that she had to go baby-sit and mumbled something about a “silly game.” Relief and disappointment took over my stomach while Faith left, the branches of Satch moving around her.

For most days, though, the Mangiamelli kids used the base of Satch as a storage unit for their bicycles, footballs, and squirt guns. Will pulled his bike to the curb and looked at the top of my head and teased, “Clip, clip, buzz, buzz. Liked it better the way it was!” Mom had cut my hair the day before.