Too Close to the Falls (20 page)

The cards stopped shuffling, the bidding came to an abrupt halt in all the rooms, and Dolores disappeared through the kitchen swinging door. In the sudden silence all that could be heard was
the swish of the air as the door kept swinging. My mother scurried after Dolores, and asked me to go upstairs and feed my caterpillars. In a voice that I could hear was fading, was losing its grip, the one she used when she said she had a headache and was going to lie down, she told me that she would speak to me
later
.

I was enraged to be sent away when all I was doing was trying to drum up some business for poor old Marie. Why did we scour the African missions in search of poor people when we had Marie smack dab in the middle of Lewiston? What about all those film strips that we saw in religion class, on the rare occasions when Sister Immaculata could figure out how to run the projector, which preached that God walks amongst us and He tests our faith. Are you the good Samaritan if you only help Miss America, but ignore the Marie Sweeneys of this world?

Engaged in these religious conundrums, I dragged myself to my room and took the rhinestone clip-on bows off my Mary Janes, threw them out the window, and watched as they sank into the snow. I couldn't resist a spiteful grin, thinking how much my mother adored them. My bow suicide never packed the wallop I'd hoped for since no one ever noticed they were gone except Roy. My mother actually found them in the spring when she was checking for the crocuses and they were perfectly alright. Instead of being angry, she said, “Well, this bow episode should be used as an ad for the Stride-Rite shoe company.”

Some years later, when my mother was dying and we were reminiscing about good times (“After all,” as my mother wisely said, “what's the point of talking about how you're feeling when you're dying — as it's kind of a one-note song”), she said she wanted to
talk about the “Marie–Dolores debacle,” as it had become known over the years. I guess that's what she meant when she said she wanted to talk to me
later
. She recounted one more detail in my day as a social pariah that I hadn't remembered at all. The human memory plays interesting tricks; it's fascinating what the unconscious chooses to let float to the surface and what stays subterranean. As Dolores was going to pieces in the kitchen, sobbing into the asparagus roll-ups, my mother said that although she made some appropriate clucking noises, all she could really do was look on helplessly. She knew Dolores's reputation was lunch meat in Lewiston. Small towns give you warmth and recognition, but sometimes that warmth is red-hot and burns you, and the recognition, if it's a juicy piece of gossip, is more painful than a public flogging. At least a flogging ends. Gossip lives on for years, and in a town like Lewiston, it grows like moss on the north side of a rock.

As happens in any emergency, everyone thinks of themselves. That day my mother's feelings for Dolores faded into her own worries. Who was going to heat and pass the food? Who was going to make the cocktails? Who was going to play
masters
bridge in my mother's foursome while she bumbled along with the food? While my mother was contemplating this horrendous situation, she flew into a tizzy matched only by Dolores's. The fallout was such that Dolores never helped at social gatherings again, which became a moot point since my mother never entertained again for the rest of her life, and Dolores never forgave me for the rest of hers.

As it
actually
happened, after the bridge-club banishment, I didn't go directly to my room, but made a quick stop at the curve
in the stairs and leaned my head through the spindles and yelled at the thirty-six players below. “You're all hypocrites and I'm closing my drapes so I never have to see any of you.” My mother, never one to criticize, said of the whole event, “I was amazed that at the age of seven you knew the word
hypocrite
.” Mother said when she re-entered the dining room to try to get the party on the rails again, all the chairs were vacated and the bridge players were tumbling out of the house, the ones most eager to escape already down the walk. They were terrified they were going to be mentioned next so they hightailed it out of there, leaving a ghost town of bridge tables. As they scattered in all directions, they said over their shoulders that poor Dolores must need to have some time alone. Mother said she was so relieved that I had managed to smoke out the whole hive of them. She pointed out that last-minute emergencies abound in home entertaining, and it was all too much for her. She was infinitely grateful to me for getting rid of everyone just as Dolores had taken a powder.

I woke up to radiators that were hissing at the cold and clanking to beat the band. My slipper socks and underwear were, as usual, waiting on the radiator for me as I tiptoed across the cold pine floor to reach them. I was tired today since I'd stayed up listening to
Fibber McGee and Molly
and
Gangbusters
on the radio that I hid
under my covers to muffle the sound.

I got set for our usual predawn routine. The frozen long underwear came off the line like cadavers in rigor mortis and the flannel sheets had to be carried in like coffins. I usually donned my favourite outfit, which my mother referred to as my “western coordinates,” blue jeans lined in cream-coloured flannel with a pattern in burnt-orange silhouette of a cowboy lassoing a bucking bronco. I cuffed the jeans exactly four inches, which revealed how stylishly the flannel lining of the pants matched the flannel shirt. If it was above zero I was allowed to wear my cowboy hat of black felt; however, if it was below zero I had to wear my wool hat with ear flaps.

First of all my father and I would start the motor, shovel the driveway, sand the ice, and scrape the windshield. Then when the car was warmed up we'd drive to Niagara Falls and have breakfast at The Horseshoe, ordering from the “early riser” menu. I had an Italian delicacy called “Quaker Oatmeal” and my father had the “get crackin'.”

At 6:00 a.m. it was my job to stock the royal-blue newspaper box and wait outside and sell the
Niagara Falls Gazette
until eight-thirty. The paper cost seven cents and customers almost always gave me a dime. I couldn't make change with my mitts on and I can still remember all the faces who smiled and said, “Keep the change,” as well as the rich men in cashmere coats and homburgs who waited patiently while I took off my gloves to find their three cold pennies.

We spent untold hours fighting the elements. We lived in the snow-belt, where ice could fell a tree as though it were a pencil. There were no snow tires, only chains, car batteries gave out when
it was more than fifteen below, plows took longer, salt was scarce, and sand didn't always do the trick.

Weather in the 1950s along the Niagara Frontier laughed at the faint-hearted. We had the ice jams of 1955 on the Niagara River in Lewiston that chewed up wooden houses and spit them out like sawdust. Even brick ones were ground to fine orange soot and sprinkled on top of huge chunks of ice that leapt over the Niagara Gorge with the power of the Falls behind them.

The snowstorms could bury cars in record time and we had only chains on our tires and batteries that needed heating just to turn over. Most kids my age stayed home and made snowmen in their yards with their moms watching them out the window to make sure they didn't wander or get frostbite. However, no matter what the weather, I knew we had to make it to the far corners of Niagara County. Every morning it was my job to scrape the ice off the forest-green Nash Rambler delivery car and make sure the insignia of the stork holding the prescription in its mouth was visible below the thick yellow letters that spelled McClure's Drugs. I then had to start the car and warm up the engine. I still remember that dull grinding thud when it was too cold to turn over. I had to keep my foot on the gas and slowly let out the choke or else we stalled or flooded. This was not an easy manoeuvre with the short legs of an eight-year-old. The car had to idle for fifteen minutes before it was slammed into drive, and those were the longest and coldest fifteen minutes of my life. When Roy arrived by nine, I'd have the car loaded with prescriptions, having mapped out our route for the day on a clipboard. I made sure we were near several “watering holes,” as Roy called taverns, at crucial parts of the day. As soon as I saw him coming up the alley,
I'd punch in the lighter, knowing he'd want his cigarette as we pulled out of the loading dock. He'd bring the paper and I'd read the weather aloud. If it forecast blizzard we still forged ahead, so I really have no idea why we ever checked the weather — it made no difference to our plans.

Roy and I found ourselves for hours in places where we had only meant to spend a minute. We dug ourselves out, lit Sterno packs, set up flares on country roads when our battery was dead so snowplows would see us in the dark. On a few stormy occasions we worked all night, dropping off our last prescription as we drove into the dawn light. But we always got the insulin, the morphine, and the Digitalis there on time. Sometimes people would be pacing, pale, and shaking by the time we arrived, but mostly their overriding emotion was amazement and gratitude that we'd made it.

This morning seemed somehow different than any other that I remembered. The light seemed clearer and it was colder. My mother's African violets died overnight on the windowsill from the cold-air drafts. The battery of the delivery car sounded as though it were full of glue, then it made no sound at all. My father had to have Vincent's Garage come over and jump-start it. Mr. Vincent always smelled like gasoline and wore a “Happy Motoring” blue jumpsuit. He came in for coffee and a cigarette to warm up, but stood at the back door blowing into his mittens, saying he had too long a list to sit down. “Yup, it's the worst cold snap since 1928. We even made the national news, minus thirty-two and falling, not including the wind chill factor, says Eric Sevareid. Even the antifreeze is hard as a rock. In all my born days I never seen the oil on the lift freeze. Why, you
couldn't lift a car this morning for love nor money.”

“Might be time to invest in a heating block for the Nash and the Lincoln — don't want to crack the engine block,” my father suggested.

“I wouldn't jump the gun on that one,” Mr. Vincent advised, “but I can tell you that they have warnings out today to stay inside if you can, and if you have to go out, stay no more than ten minutes at a time. Wind chill takin' her down to minus seventy-eight! Otherwise they're goin' to need an ice pick to thaw ya out!”

My mother said, “Well, I for one will not take one step out of this house.” We all laughed, knowing it was not a great personal sacrifice for my mother not to take a step out of the house. In fact, the weather conditions had to be near perfect for her to venture past the front parlour.

As I put on my boots, I told Dad that I might have to sell the newspapers from
inside
the store today. I also reminded him to leave the car running while Roy loaded up the deliveries, just in case the battery couldn't handle the load. Father nodded in agreement.

Mr. Vincent tousled my hair and said, “I'm waitin' for the weather that slows this one down.” Laughing at his own joke, he continued, “I bet you've been prayin' for that cold snap.”

My father smiled and said, “She's my right-hand man.” He stubbed out his cigarette and donned his Hudson's Bay red boiled wool jacket with the big black stripe. He usually only wore that jacket when we went to the hardware store, shovelled the snow, or cut the Christmas tree. I'd never seen him forego his topcoat when he wore his suit. This breach of decorum is what told me it was really cold. When he donned his wool cap with the ear flaps
instead of his homburg, I knew it was a national disaster.

As we walked to the garage we were accosted by the cold. The clothes on the line swung at us like dancing mummies. It hurt to breathe, and the hairs in my nostrils, of which I was previously unaware, were immediately coated with ice. I felt as though I were breathing through stalactites and stalagmites. My breath froze on my upper lip. When Mr. Vincent hopped up into his tow truck he spit, and it was frozen by the time it hit the ground with a ping, and shattered.