Little Girl Big Depression

Little Girl Big Depression

By Doris Teresa Wight

Smashwords Edition

Published by Bird-in-Hand Publishing

Copyright © 2013 by Doris Teresa Wight

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page/License Notes

Chapter 1 Waking Up in Beaupassay

Chapter 2 Simon Legree’s Bachelor Buttons

Chapter 3 The Male Principle

Chapter 4 The Female Principle

Chapter 5 Big Brother Tries to live up to Expectations

Chapter 6 Romance Comes to Beaupassay

Chapter 7 The Gerards and My Sin with Celeste

Chapter 8 Lies and the Truth

Chapter 9 Ten Days Away from Mama/Family Secrets

Chapter 10 Why Grandma Sanasack Made up with Ma

Chapter 11 School for Big Brother and Then Me

Chapter 12 Revolt of the Female Principle

Chapter 13 Beautiful Past, Live!

Chapter 1

Waking up in Beaupassay

1932. America struggles its way through the Brother Can You Spare a Dime days. Days of investment losses, exhausted savings and unemployment. Days of the Forgotten Man’s voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pledge of a New Deal for the American people in an effort to cope with the greatest depression this country has ever known. Days of incredible hopelessness and of incredibly defiant hope. In the American midlands—fairly close to Chicago but far enough away so that the inhabitants of these quiet flat-land Illinois farms and small towns seldom visit the roaring metropolis—there lies a particular small community peopled largely by short, dark-complexioned, devoutly Catholic, French-speaking families. That town bears at one end this impressive self-identification and threat:

Beaupassay. Population 600. Police Protection!

The first third of Beaupassay (the little town into which Annette Sanasack has awakened, astonished, to find herself a living and breathing being) still sleeps. A second third of the Beaupassay populace, yawning, blinks watering eyes against the increasingly brilliant light. But the last third of Annie’s town (like Annie herself) has already discovered this April morning’s invigorating breeze.

Clip … clop … clip …

Iron shoes rattle the creaking wagon over Beaupassay’s cobbled streets. Old now (hardly worth the terror that he and his counterpart, the iceman’s mare, arouse in little Annie), the milkman’s horse is no longer aware of the blinkers at the sides of his eyes. Nor does he suspect the violent joy he arouses in the Sanasacks’ four-year-old who, when she sees him coming, runs to hide behind a tree where, in safety, she can thrillingly peek at him. Patient, the aged equine hero swishes his tail from one side of lean shanks to the other, while his gossip-loving master— whistling, white-clad Guy Rouault— takes people’s front steps two-at-a-time with his clacking bottle racks and his whispered tales of the sins and follies of his fellow townsmen and townswomen.

Men fortunate enough to have jobs in these dark and painful times, along with their wives who get their breakfasts, have risen and sit eating oatmeal or cream of wheat— nutritious yet cheap. Among these fortunate folks are Annie Sanasack’s father Daniel and her mother Juliette, the Sanasacks’ neighbors across the street, and Valerie and Ray Gerard (Ray runs a gas station). Other townspeople included the Beaupassay dog catcher, Louie Freneau (whom children despise and adults suspect, since Louie never goes to church and he occasionally makes sarcastic comments about God and the Pope, of being an atheist), and baldheaded Louis Mailloux (whose grocery store, the only one in town, must be patronized despite ants that Julie Sanasack and Valerie Gerard sometimes find in bread loaves purchased from Mailloux—and despite red cockroaches with exploring antennae that scurry suddenly from behind Mailloux’s huge, glass-door cookie cases to stare down the Sanasack and Gerard children—and in spite of the fact that Mr. Mailloux clears his throat with a rattling huskiness and horrifyingly hrrrrraaaaaccckks his spit into the tan sawdust in his store’s butcher section).

Dressed in his State Police uniform, Dan Sanasack will soon step into the car of his Italian friend King Visconte to ride to work in the neighboring town of Kaukakee, and Ray Gerard will head on foot for the gas station he runs down the street.

Hallo: robin redbreast cocks his head, listening for worms. Rat-tat-tat drums a downy woodpecker against an elm, knocking for grubs. Sparrows twit in trees and fluff feathers or fly down to clean themselves in old water puddles or dust pools, but aristocratic avians claim the bird bath by the Sacred Blood Seminary, where many years ago six-year-old Dan Sanasack, who had spoken nothing but French at home, first learned from the brothers to speak English, to read, and to do arithmetic. For a long time little Dan was teased at home because of what happened his first day at school with the brothers, after which the excited boy had run home, screaming in French the entire last block, Mama, I dirtied my pants! I dirtied my pants! At that same Sacred Blood Seminary many years later the same Daniel Sanasack, become a married man with a wife and children to support but no job since he had been laid off (Dan had moved back to Beaupassay to live near his relatives in these hard times) had for a month, until fortunately a job opened up for him with the state police, washed dishes for the brothers for fifty cents a day. Today nuns at Stabat Mater Convent, not seminary brothers, teach Beaupassay’s children. But by the seminary the same strong breezes as of yore sway the stems of early flowers, while sunrays still coax at petals:

Open! Open!

From Ave Regina church peal out the bells of Mass. Inside the sacristy crabby old Father Napoleon frowns, blessing himself and muttering prayers as he expertly dons one after another the garments of sacrifice. Marguerite Fisher’s face, swollen with tears, has just flashed across the pastor’s mind. "Why will they want to marry out of the church? Let Bishop Hennessey grumble all he wants, I’ll not perform the ceremony!" thinks the inflexible man of God, the terror not only of his Beaupassay flock, but even of his Irish bishop. Indeed, the angry old French fireball breathes so heavily at that moment that little altar boy Alphonse Lamonde, coming in several minutes late, feels his mind blank out. Father Napoleon, however, his mind on higher matters, for once ignores his altar boy’s deficiencies. Shaking himself to let fall straight the final outer garment with its precious stiff satin and the dominating cross on the back, Father shoos Alphonse impatiently, hurrying the boy to precede him out onto the altar. What amazing lightness in Father Napoleon’s skinny, hairless legs under all those sacred garments as he steps out onto the altar carpet to say Mass today to those two elderly Beaupassay women!

In the large residence of the mayor, one of Xavier Legris’ girls lies fidgeting in her sleep. The lips of this, the older and slightly prettier daughter, part, and Betty’s eyebrows lift above her closed lids at some disturbance to her rest. Her anxious, somnolent expression, a strange mixture of pain and bliss, deepens; and Betty Legris may even be awakened at last by some visitor settled on her soft lower lip. As on a satin, peach-colored cushion, causing the sixteen-year-old ecstasies of confused desire that her dreams labor to explain and fulfill, the brazen fellow stands combing transparent wings. In the adjoining bedroom, not having reached quite so ripe an age as her sister and having no fly to tease her own sweet, sensitive mouth, Lisa Legris slumbers peacefully.

Now that boisterous morning breeze, growing stronger, stronger as it whips along Beaupassay’s Main Street with its world-traveler air, kicks its heels around the town’s fat round water tower, Beaupassay’s highest structure, and snaps its fingers at Beaupassay’s pretentious town sign— this wind apparently having nothing in mind but its invigorating self and its self-appointed duty to herald this glorious day to this cozy little Illinois community.

But look, look! That madcap wind has picked up a stray paper plate, turned it on its end, and now rolls that flat white silly circle around and around on its rim down Main Street: rolling, rolling it … rolling … rolling…. Can anyone see such a delirious sight and not laugh?

Yes, some. Wrinkled old Constance Gousset shakes her pink-ribboned nightcap and grumbles pettishly at poor dead Alfred Gousset (several years out of her reach now) as she turns on her pillow, resisting the slight sounds of her daughter Domethilde’s movements in the kitchen below, and falls back asleep. This thirty-two year old Tildy Gousset, one of the town’s few single working women, sits alone downstairs grumpily eating her Corn Flakes before climbing into her new Buick to drive off with a great blast. Now she ignores with pursed lips her charming yellow companion who, alert and bright in the sun that streams into his cage from the window, hops up onto his swing and whistles with such mad cheer that Domethilde at last is forced to acknowledge her canary’s existence: Shush! Shush, you silly Dickie-boy, shush! scolds Tildy.

—Shush indeed!

What causes one to wake from an eternity of sleep? Specks of dust, like sand, floated onto my cheek, warming it, in the sun-stream slanting into the room along with the wind. Seized by joy, for awhile I thought only of those motes in the golden stream, though consciousness of many other things, too, stirred somewhere in my mind, like the curtain’s slight billowing like a ship’s sail, faint noises from downstairs below in the back of the house, the kitchen part, and the empty sensation in my stomach.

…Little live dust beings, so weenie that each one makes a person as big as me think it’s a mere speck; but they’re not just flecks of dust, they’re teensy people floating there….

Through narrowed eyes I tried to pick out from all the rest one particular sandy fellow to follow and figure out, but since this proved impossible, I leaned over and tried to gather the entire populace into my hands. Cleverly, the multitudes eluded me, filtering through my fingers and away; but in my increasingly energetic stretches to capture the space debris, I reached so far that finally I dumped myself overboard to land—plunk!

I fell out of bed! For a moment I just lay there on the floor in astonished delight. Finally, by shifting my position slightly—a matter of untangling and adjusting my left leg so that it was off the sock and shoe—I was able to sit comfortably down there and could ponder the dust balls directly ahead of me.

Was it destined that I get onto my hands and knees and crawl, sneezing twice, right underneath the bed? Dust-globes … squareness … springs, in one of which some of my hair got tangled, making me laugh … the blue and white striped bottom of the mattress above the springs … four metal legs…. How novel, yet somehow familiar, everything was! Finally, by thinking hard (trying this thought and that one, testing each for the feeling it gave me to see if it were the one I was trying to locate) I managed to place the sensation given me by this deserted under-bed place usually visited only by Mama’s dust mop.

That feeling: yes, it was the same you get when you slip behind a tree or door to hide for a minute, terribly excited. In that confined space you become suddenly, strangely, intensely conscious of yourself…. of your self, especially of your breathing— as if that breath is you… Annie …

Achingly white, heartbreakingly bright, snow shone through the peek-hole—a circle of visibility big as a quarter—on the windowpane. Heated breath had produced that spot earlier this morning as I stood very close to the cold glass, my warm nose tip touching and, alas, defacingly melting those beautiful silvery layers of swirl which had appeared magically during the night.

Someone sighed, and again into my head came a certain question: The use of reason? Those words had reappeared constantly this entire miserable hour.

Miserable, yes: awful down here in the dark corner of the living room where, squatting, over the hot-air register, someone sat. The metal grill and square bordering strip of the hot-air register directly beneath her was blistering hot, and though she had arranged her legs as carefully as possible, her delicate flesh lay in constant danger of being branded right there on the back of her thighs where only narrow elastic garters protected her, where long cotton stockings ended and underpants hadn’t yet begun.

Someone sighed again, for not only might her skin be grilled like a waffle, but the register beneath kept wafting up into her nostrils air from Daddy’s furnace below, air not only so dry and dusty that the someone’s nose itched and wanted to sneeze, but worse yet, air with a humiliating telltale odor. Well, here was distraction: the way my dark red woolen skirt puffed up ever so slightly in the rush-gush of hot air. Dreamily, balloons escaped into the sky … clouds floated … dandelion seeds hovered like little umbrellas…. And now my eyes stopped hazing and focused again, noticing the circle on the window across the room.

Jack Frost, hurrying past in the North Wind, touching the windows with his fingertip… The melted circle on the icy painting had refrozen, but it continued to prove that hot human breath had changed the window, just as had that scampish finger outside.

If I could just catch him at it once, outside there!

The use of reason? someone demanded of me, and then another voice in my head chanted, witheringly, Shame, shame, double shame. Everybody knows your name!

"What is your name?" a new stern grown-up suddenly demands.

Annette Teresa Sanasack.

Where do you live, little girl?

I live at—four! Number Four Main Street in Beaupassay! My address is easy since it’s the same number as my age. Hold the thumb back and let all the fingers on one hand stand up stiffly, triumphantly.

Four!

Three, four, shut the door. One, two, button my shoe … Sheer nonsense now floods my brain. Five, six, pick up sticks… The use of reason… Have I reached the use of reason?

(The use of reason? That’s when you know right from wrong. Children as a rule attain the use of reason when they’re seven years old, Mama had explained. Phillip, you might have the use of reason already, although you’re only six, but as for you—oh no, Annie; you’re way too little yet!)

Suddenly Mama’s real voice supersedes her dream voice in my ears.

"Oh Annie, so that’s where you are!"

Almost asleep, my head had dropped by itself down onto stockinged knee. With effort I raised my fuzzy head and groaned from the strain of having sat straddle-fashion so long. Mama’s words, Oh Annie, so that's where you are! hung and echoed several times in the empty, stifling, parched drum that served as my cranium, the words hanging in there like pictures on wires.

Are you cold, Annie? Do you want to put on a sweater? A mountainous woman was moving around the room with her dust-rag, some mammoth impostor posing as someone familiar, looming menacingly over me as I sat way down here in my corner. And now the giantess approached me with that sneeze-provoking cloth, ready to confront me and discover my problem, my secret!

No, I don’t want my sweater, Ma. I tried to sound natural, and I kept half-waving my hand to send her away, shoo her off, as if my small fingers had potency, by wish alone, to lift that huge body and set it down at a greater, safer distance. My face had contorted itself into a bright, Halloween smile. I like it down here, it’s cozy, vocal cords fibbed through tightly smiling, parched lips.

The fluttering hem of a mother too busy to pay attention to a child not requiring it swooshed away towards the rungs of the dining-room chairs; and collapsing in relief at having escaped discovery, weak in the sensation of let-down that safety brings after impending danger has been averted, and despairing, too, at the prospect of having to continue to sit at my insufferable post until the end of time, I furtively felt something there down below.

No, still a little damp—darn it!

I’d simply have to wait here until they dried if it killed me!

Shame, shame, double shame, my embarrassed cheeks and suffering nose sang, shame, shame … the use of reason?

From the first long nothingness you wake to find yourself a member of homo sapiens, already four years old, a feeling and thinking human being sophisticated enough to concoct fancies about specks of dust and feel thrilled at being underneath a bed instead of on top of it, and to intuitively repeat insights into the nature of breath perceived millennia ago in India. Other hazy shapes from the long inherited treasures and from the more recent personal past thrust themselves forward into the spring air, trying to come in, claiming not to belong to the blankness and the darkness: you did do that, slip and hide behind a door once—several times—several doors—it happened! Though you can’t quite … quite … grasp it, however, which door? —When? —Where?

Sitting with wet pants on a hot-air register in winter, you have a name and an age and a store of knowledge already, including an uncertain past. In between these awakenings, these recurring births into awareness, however, oblivion periodically descends. As if you had gone on a trip, you seem to have missed May and June entirely. Where does time go? Or mind? Or is it memory playing these tricks?

But here she is again, that little girl who was somehow, incomprehensibly, me, now with a yellow cotton dress on backwards (her favorite dress, the blowy one), hopping on one foot through the downstairs, repeating Hickory dickory dock and thinking herself a big girl indeed, while ignoring the suspicious clicking of metal tips of some sort (surely not those shoelaces come loose already?) trailing behind her, bouncing against solid things in an amazingly concrete world.

[TOC]

Chapter 2

Simon Legree’s Bachelor Buttons

In case you’re wondering whose flowers wilt faster, rich people’s or poor people’s, perhaps I can help you, for my experience with Simon Legree’s bachelor buttons answered my question once and for all back in 1933 in the middle of the Depression. And I was only four years old at the time! But to really grasp the answer I received to that profound question you will have to understand the mystique surrounding people like the rich neighbor whose mansion incredibly within my family’s very sight, at the other end of the block from our and the elderly Dandersands’ little rented houses across a long, long, perhaps infinitely long field. It is true that despite the mystique (shades of F. Scott Fitzgerald!) surrounding the race of the rich, my father had actually once dared to run against our powerful neighbor to see which one, Simon Legree or Dan Sanasack, would be mayor of Beaupassay! But let me start with my mother and Mrs. Dandersand as they sat on our front porch swing discussing that very event, the recent election…

"Not even the nuns would promise to vote for Dan!" Ma shook her head in dismay. These words were familiar to me (I was sitting on a little gray stool by Mama’s knee) because the grown-ups had held this particular conversation several times already. My young, pretty mother and stout, elderly, gray-haired Mabel Dandersand didn’t really have much in common, you see. The Dandersands were even worse off than we were. The old couple was— oh disgrace! — on government relief, something that my mother and father and all their relatives intensely disapproved of and would have died, they insisted, rather than apply for, no matter how hard up they got. You helped each other, you and your relatives, and you did without, but you never ever would lower yourself to ask for help from the government! Both Daddy’s family and Mama’s family used to be staunch Republicans, and the older people still