Chapter 3
I stood on our front steps and stared at the house across the street, willing her to appear. The Cadillac was gone and everything was still. I was trying to decide whether to go back in the house and watch American Bandstand or go across the street and knock on her door.
I chose the latter and sauntered across the street, pausing for a moment to pick up a good luck penny I spotted on the side of the road, stuffed it into the pocket of my shorts along with the four leaf clover I found earlier while cutting the grass and headed up her driveway to the back door. It was creepy since I hadn’t stepped foot in that yard all the years Mr. Luoto lived there. I felt like a criminal, like I was up to no good instead of just paying someone a nice neighborly visit. I had visions of myself making license plates in some horrible jail for female trespassers in Manitoba. I rang the doorbell two or three times but there was no answer so I took the liberty of peeking in the window. There were a few unopened cardboard cartons in the middle of the ultra-modern kitchen with its white appliances and shiny chrome fixtures. Everything looked cold and uninviting and other than the cartons it was immaculate—too tidy for a house that had just been moved into that morning. Poor old man Luoto, if he could only see his house now, he’d roll over in his grave and have another heart attack. When I turned to leave, Harold was standing at the foot of the steps watching me. I was so frightened I almost jumped right out of my skin.
“Jesus H. Korkala!” I screeched. “What are you doing ... spying on me? Look at me! I’m shaking like a leaf!”
“Sorry Jo. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he apologized. “What are you sneaking around here for anyway?”
“I’m not sneaking around. I came to visit the new girl.”
“What new girl?”
“Beth Luoto. Old man Luoto’s granddaughter. I met her this morning when I was cutting the grass. She told me I could visit her anytime. She’s going to be a movie star. In New York. Like Elizabeth Taylor only bigger cuz she’s Elizabeth Evans.” “Oh yeah! You don’t look like you’re supposed to be here. Snooping in people’s windows and stuff. And what’s a movie star doing living across the street from us eh?”
“I wasn’t snooping. I was just looking to see if she was home. I thought maybe the door bell wasn’t working!” I brushed past him and stomped down the driveway. He stood there for a moment, then ran to catch up with me. By this time I was furious. “She isn’t one yet Korkala,” I hissed, “I said she’s going to be ... when she gets out of this dump of a town.”
“Sorry Jo,” he apologized again, even though I knew he didn’t know what he had said or done that made me so angry. He only knew it had something to do with him. That’s just the way it was with Harold and me. I got angry and he apologized. Half the time neither of us knew why.
The significance of someone who was practically a movie star living in our town much less right across the street, flew right over his head and landed in Timbuktu. Poor Harold, he just didn’t have a clue.
“Hey Jo, don’t you wanna know why I tracked you down?” he asked, all keen and excited like he was about to tell me he had just won a million dollars.
“No Korkala. I don’t. Unless it’s news of your departure permanently from my life I’m not interested,” I snapped, kicking a rock as we crossed the street. He kept walking beside me like one of those neurotic little Chihuahua dogs that bark and nip at your feet whenever they get excited.
Ignoring (or worse yet, not noticing) that I was about to explode with anger, he starts babbling on about his mother and long deceased father.
“Mama wants to know if your family can come for supper tomorrow night. It’s Papa’s birthday. She made a cake.”
“Korkala, you don’t have a father. He died when you were two remember,” I said impatiently.
“So! We can still celebrate his birthday. It’s a Finnish thing.”
“Oh please. It is not. What crap!”
“Okay so it isn’t a Finnish thing. It’s just something we want to do. Come on this is his sixtieth and it would mean a lot to her.”
“If it’s such a big deal why hasn’t she said anything to Ma?
They tell each other everything.”
“Because it was my idea, kinda last minute and all I know.
I told Mama I’d do the inviting ... you know get everything set up with you first.”
“Why?”
“Because I just thought it would be nice,” he said. Harold had this way of saying the word nice that was so NICE it was sickening.
“No, I mean why me? Why do you have to set things up with me first?”
“I don’t know. Why not?” He gave me this puzzled look like I had just asked him to walk in front of a moving bus but good old Harold had turned into a pit bull by this time and there was just no tearing him away from this notion he had about dinner. “It’s been such a long time since we’ve had your family over,” he continued like he was delivering earth-shattering news. “Korkala our families just had dinner together,” I said. “Not since Easter and that was at your place,” he said.
“Easter,” I repeated. Could it have been that long? Why did it seem like last week? Was I losing my mind?
“Mama gets so sad at this time of year,” he continued. “You know he died on his birthday. We were just about to have the cake, just the three of us having this nice family celebration. I was too young to remember of course but Mama told me all about it when I was old enough to understand...”
“When was that? Yesterday!”
Ignoring my sarcasm, he carried right on with his story about his dead father without even skipping a beat, “anyway right in the middle of him blowing out the candles—bam! Drops dead from a heart attack—right there in front of Mama and me. He does this face plant directly into the whipping cream and double fudge icing. So I just thought if we did something really nice this year with your family eh she wouldn’t be so sad. Come on Jo? Whadoya say?” Harold got this pathetic sad-dog look on his face, the kind that you’d have to be totally stone hearted to walk away from. I’m not sure if he had ever told me that story about his father’s death before but it really got to me.
“Ah jeez Korkala,” I sighed as I watched him walk happily home to his Mrs. K. and their fake birthday party plans. I spent the rest of the afternoon planting pansies, impatiens and marigolds in the garden beds that surrounded our house. From time-to-time I glanced over at the Luoto mansion, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. When I was finished, I pulled out a fluorescent green webbed lawn chair from the basement and planted it in the middle of the front yard where I pretended to be reading my mother’s latest copy of Family Circle magazine. Danny and Ma came home around five. They had decided to go shopping after lunch. I was so busy thinking about Beth I hadn’t even noticed that they were three hours late. Danny brought up another chair from the basement and placed it next to mine.
“What’s up squirt?” I asked, as Danny pulled out a bag of licorice Jujubes and started stuffing her face. “How about one?” She handed me the bag and said, “Ma took me to the plaza eh. We even went to Pet Land to see the new kittens. There was eight of ‘em. All different colors. They were so cute. I liked the black one with the white paws the best. I bet his name was Boots.”
“Boots. Ma actually took you inside Pet Land?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean Dan? Not exactly.”
“They were in the window ... in a big basket ... and we looked at them through the glass ... but we were practically inside.”
“That’s like being practically pregnant Dan.”
“I guess,” she shrugged, but I could tell she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
“So what else did you do?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothin’. You were gone three hours Danny. Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere. Home.”
“It took you three hours to get home?”
“I can’t remember.” Danny hated being put on the spot, although in my mind I was just trying to have a little conversation, but she thought I was giving her the third degree. She was getting real tense. I could see her bottom lip starting to quiver and her black eyes filling with tears. I had to think of something fast to prevent her from losing it and letting out a big howl that would have attracted the unwanted attention of my mother. Danny was the nervous type and it took very little to set her off but for some inexplicable reason Ma thought I was deliberately trying to make Dan cry all the time, like I was some mean spirited person. I wasn’t of course; it’s just that I was getting to an age where I didn’t want my kid sister hanging around me all the time. “Ah jeez Dan. Do you wanna play catch?”
“Sure Jo!” she gushed and smiled so wide I could see all these licorice bits stuck between her teeth from the Jujubes. Her lips were all black too which made her look like a miniature vampire but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to set her off again. “Go get the ball and our gloves and we’ll toss a few before supper eh?”
Danny and I weren’t like other girls. First of all, we had boy’s names, real boy’s names, not nicknames like Charlotte becoming Charlie or Samantha, or Sam. We were Jo Frances and Danny Marie Fasano, named after my father and his best buddy who wasn’t lucky enough to make it back from the war and find his “bastard father had married a whore young enough to be his daughter,” as Joe always said whenever he made any reference to my grandfather. I guess I was Jo Junior but I didn’t like to think of it that way. When I was born, I think my father knew deep down inside that he would never have a son, not a real one anyway. Sometimes I think he wanted Danny and I to be boys so bad that he actually tricked himself into believing that we were. If it weren’t happening to us, I would have thought that it was real sad for someone to go his whole life feeling like that.
At first I thought he blamed my mother for bearing only girls, as if we were somehow inferior beings, but I realized that summer that he actually hated himself all along. In his mind he had this Italian machismo notion, that he wasn’t man enough to make sons. I think that’s why he was always trying to prove himself, always showing off, doing things other fathers never did. I remember one time he climbed up on the roof of the house to repair the shingles. Instead of just going up there and fixing the stupid things he had to strut around on the roof like Elvis Presley, gyrating and making a fool of himself, not to mention scaring Ma half to death. She stood below on the lawn calling to him to come down. “You’re gonna fall Joe. Be careful. Come down here before you hurt yourself.” Eventually he climbed down, unhurt and unrepentant, a little too smug. Ma stomped back into the house shaking his hand off her back and pulling away as he followed her in, calling her name in this embarrassing voice that should have been left for the privacy of their bedroom. At times like those I wished he had fallen. Not necessarily died or anything, just hurt himself enough to wipe that smug look off his face.
Because my father treated us like boys we never got girl’s toys when we were growing up. Not even at Christmas, no matter how good we were all year long, no matter how many cookies we left out for Santa, no matter how many letters we wrote him. Instead of Barbie dolls and Chatty Cathy’s, we got hockey skates and baseball gloves, train sets and racing cars. Joe Senior encouraged us to play sports of all kinds. The thing was, Danny and I hated organized sports, except for baseball. I longed to dress up Barbie and take her out on a date with Ken. All Danny wanted was a stuffed animal to hang onto at night when things got too dark and scary. Until that summer Danny and I both played on teams. Just like the Saturday morning ritual with my family, so went the baseball team. Joe Senior wasn’t too happy about me giving it up but as long as Danny played, he still had hope. Then Dan did the unthinkable and announced one night at supper—right over a plate of rigatoni and veal Parmesan—that if I wasn’t playing, she wasn’t either. In our family we didn’t just break bread, we broke bad news and often at the same time. The kid had guts. Shattering our poor old man’s fantasy that we could become major league ball players. He actually believed it too. It was pathetic.
I still enjoyed tossing a few though. It eased this peculiar tension that was growing uncontrollably inside of me day-by-day. Danny and I would spend hours throwing the ball back and forth in the warm tranquil evenings before the sun went down. The air was still and quiet except for the steady, rhythmic thud of the ball hitting our gloves. We didn’t say too much as the ball passed from glove-to-glove, sister-to-sister. The truth is we didn’t have to because when Danny and I were out there in the back yard tossing that ball back and forth we had this language all our own that didn’t require words. And no matter what was going on outside our little circle of two it couldn’t touch us just as long as we kept tossing that ball back-and-forth, back-and-forth.
Danny and I each had separate bedrooms on the second floor. My parents slept downstairs so they could have their privacy. That night my room was impossibly hot and humid, the sheets felt sticky next to my skin. I threw off the covers and lay across the bed tossing from side-to-side, front-to-back. The thought of Beth Luoto, a movie star in the making, living across the street left me restless and unable to sleep. I considered sneaking out and going over to see if she was real and not another one of those fantasies that I escaped to lately to overcome the monotony of my life. On nights when I couldn’t sleep I used to climb down the tree outside my window and take off on my bike to Penny Creek, otherwise known as Hobo Creek. My father was always threatening to chop down that old tree, not because he knew it was my escape route but because he said the roots were destroying the foundation of the house. I had news for him; it wasn’t the tree that was destroying the foundation of our house.
I’d sit on the edge of Hobo Creek, which ran right through the middle of Cherkover’s Field and skip stones, all the while making plans for the future. I thought a lot about what I’d do as soon as I was old enough to leave Port Arthur. Beth Luoto wasn’t the only one who was getting out after high school. Some nights I dreamed of moving to Toronto or London and becoming a writer. Other nights I thought about joining the Peace Corps and going to some Third World country where I could be like Mother Theresa and feed starving kids. I thought of going to Japan to teach English or to one of those communes in Nebraska where everyone ate brown rice and made love all day.
I’d spend a couple of hours plotting out an entirely new life for myself. Only after I was completely finished mapping out my future could I leave and go home. I could sleep after that knowing that I had some alternatives. The funny thing was I never felt frightened down there at Hobo Creek in the middle of the night. I felt safer sitting by that dirty old creek surrounded by darkness and a bunch of invisible bums than I ever did in our house.