1939: A Novella

9781483530697

1

We had spent I don’t know how long with the man from Triple A, so we knew our route for this trip by heart, even though I’d told Brother I just wanted to hop in the car and meander to our destination.

That’s not actually true. I did tell him that, but what I wanted was to want to meander without a map, I wanted to be so adventuresome, but I was nearly as afraid as Brother. Or Arthur, as I am to call him ever since I decided to go from being called Sister and Elizabeth to Lilly, of all names, though Brother’s real name is actually Chester.

Lilly is a flower and I am not flower-like in any way what-so-ever. I’m equine, really, except not nearly so graceful as any horse I’ve ever seen. Too tall, too long limbed, too long toothed. Some people say I look like Eleanor Roosevelt, but that’s not true because she was beautiful once while I never was. My voice evidently annoys people as they say hers does, though personally I think hers is musical and brave. Mine bothered Father but he was too kind to tell me so. He never blamed me either, he knew it was not my fault and I was told over and over by Mother that he loved me none-the-less, in fact, all the more for the fact that I modulated my voice as best I could.

And so I did. Despite feeling like a young filly, meant to flip and flick her long limbs about, I achingly kept them still as well.

My dear friend and Nurse, who completely and utterly changed my entire life, once said to me, Oh dear, what a sad life you’ve lived. And you are so beautiful! Too beautiful a spirit for such a life.

That scared me to death. Me? Beautiful? No one had ever said that to me before. I wondered if this kind of talk weren’t an opening to some kind of who-knew-what and it embarrassed me.

Not that Mother and Father didn’t praise me and love and protect both Brother and me always - we were the center of their lives! - but most of the praise I ever received was for controlling myself so well.

And for no good reason, either, Nurse said, It’s crazy.

I didn’t like her saying that, it felt disloyal, but of course, that was before Mother and Father so shockingly, suddenly and earth-shatteringly died and everything changed, leading to this enormous.....mess, I’d guess you’d call it.

2

Well, things didn’t change right away. I’d had a nervous disorder that sent me to bed months before Mother and Father ever died. My insides quivered day and night, my head felt loopy, my arms and legs dropsy-like, not that I know what dropsy is. I could never pin-point what was wrong.

Until then I’d always been healthy as a horse. See, there I go with horses again. I am now convinced I was a staggeringly beautiful Arabian mare in another life, while in this life I’ve never even been riding! Though I’d love to.

Since Mother herself was an invalid and my complaints defied diagnosis and were prolonged, she hired a nurse. My friend Nurse, the one who believed my nerves would be cured by a normal, active life, that there was nothing else wrong with me but a poor diet and a home that snuffed the life from me. While I longed not to believe her, not to feel so happy that someone thought I was just fine, that I was well, that there was nothing in the world wrong with me, at the same time I felt so sorry for Mother and Father who only loved me more than they could stand.

They’d had hardships and tragedies of their own, which left them rabbit-like, frightened and reclusive. They preferred dim light, soft sounds, little change, no fresh air. They wrung their hands and hoped their two children would outlive them.

The very thought of anything happening to us nearly killed them, they said.

3

Traveling down the highway with the convertible top open, still able to hear the birds sing gloriously over the wind and the hum of this beautiful car that Brother, I mean Arthur, bought for this journey, felt spectacular. To me, anyway. Evidently not to Arthur

The mountains, the clear air, the running creeks, the switchbacks of turn after turn when around each bend we’d come on another gorgeous view, all brought out the feeling I’d had for some time: the painful, excited, light headed feeling that I’d begun a new life, in fact, I’d begun to come to life, I’d broken free of chains and ropes. Or perhaps I’d only emerged from my chrysalis.

Since I’d been on this trip, Mother and Father and our dark, close, elegant and quiet home back in Indiana seemed like another life-time. People either say a trip gives you distance from your life to ponder it, to evaluate it, or it shows you that the grass isn’t any greener elsewhere. All I can say is, I’d never ever traveled before and I’d decided there was nothing like it.

4

Mother and Father, and all of us really, suffered a tragedy years ago and thus we learned about the unpredictability of this world, of life, how terrifyingly thin is the veil between living and dying.

Mother claimed Father was a bold man, so strong and protective she, who was frightened of everything, always felt safe in his presence. That was before his elderly senile mother arrived at his accounting firm, brandishing a pistol. She shot him twice, once in the calf, once in the pelvis, despite firing six times. She hit the wall once, killing a client, an elderly hypochondriac who rarely left home, who sat in the waiting room, shot the floor twice, and hit Father’s desk chair, sending it careening on its wheels across the room at high speed and bursting out the window. In her senility, she believed her son was her husband and in a jealous rage shot him as he hugged his wife, my pregnant mother, goodbye.

My mother narrowly missed being shot herself but she did lose her baby from fright and never got over it. My father changed so thoroughly one could see it in his face. Their wedding portrait hung near the fireplace and as a groom Father was a bright-eyed, square-headed, large and confident man, smiling grandly with his arm tightly squeezing Mother’s shoulders, bucking her up. It was difficult for me to believe this was my same sunken faced Father, with his dark, fleshy eyes and creases of fear and worry criss-crossing his face. Mother, typically, clasped her hands, passively gazed upward, her tiny, fragile features and brave little mouth seeming to await sadness. Her parents were English and she always spoke with their accent, which added somehow to her flower-like fragility

5

One Sunday evening a year and one quarter ago, Mother and Father inexplicably took a country drive in their Pierce Arrow. They weren’t showy people, they only bought such a fancy car because they believed it was the safest and most dependable. They were very wealthy, both their families had money that they had inherited, something to do with shipping and Chicago and commodities.

They spent little and lived modestly, except for buying the Pierce Arrow, which was barely damaged in the accident.

Just as inexplicably, to everyone but Brother and me, they came to a full stop in the middle of a highway, after a deep bend. There was no shoulder beside the road just there, pines grew on either side and it was dusk. We know Mother’s stomach got upset and that she asked Father to stop to settle her nerves. Some poor, old, newly-widowed lady who had only just begun driving after her husband died and who could hardly see over the hood of the car, slammed into the back of them. She saw them too late and stomped on the throttle pedal rather than the brake pedal, and so they were mangled and the car only scratched and dented.

Over and over the doctors and the policemen and the insurance agent and the strangers from the church we sporadically attended - we knew almost no one - wondered what could they have been doing stopped in the middle of the road like that. Did he have a heart attack? A stroke? An apoplectic fit? Had he almost hit something? Had the car broken down?

We’d been with them when they’d done the very same thing many