When We Were the Kennedys (10 page)

“What are you reading?”

I look up. It's Denise, standing nearby with her bicycle. We were friends at school but I haven't seen her since school let out.

“Nancy Drew. She's a sleuth.”

“I love Nancy Drew.” Denise lays her bike on the grass, and in the miraculous way of childhood friendships, this moment—or a moment like it, small and unremarkable—marks our first as best and lifelong friends.

“You have to leave your bike outside the fence,” I tell her. Our landlords are fussy about their grass, their driveway, their everything.

Denise moves her bike, then sits on the grass with me. She tilts my book to look at the cover.

“I don't have this one.”

“I've already read it,” I say. “I'll ask Norma if you can borrow it.”

Denise looks at me for a moment; she likes me a lot, but like other children she's a little bit afraid of me because my father died. “You want to come over to my house?”

I look up; I can see her block on Brown Street from here—she, too, lives on the top floor—just over the rooftop of the O'Neills'.

“Okay.”

Unbeknownst to Denise—or anyone—I've begun writing my own mystery, starring a titian-haired girl with no freckles. This character, named Nancy Drew—but not
the
Nancy Drew—will solve
The Mystery of the Missing Man.
I've cracked open a clean pack of Dad's paper, feeling a little like Ferdinand Magellan setting out in his ship. I've set goals: A man will go missing in Chapter 1. Cliffhangers will ensue. Then the man will be found. In an act of authorial benevolence, I've exhumed Nancy's mother (
Nancy, dear, you really must try harder to keep out of trouble!
) and retained her “prominent attorney” father, but I've ditched the housekeeper, the boyfriend, and the girl sidekicks. My Nancy will do her sleuthing alone.

I've written two pages full of beginning—Nancy's mother, Nancy's father, Nancy's house, Nancy's yard, Nancy's clothes and car and meals—searching, I suppose (in my book, in every book), for a family with no missing pieces, the family we used to be. When I follow Denise up the stairs of her block, where her beautiful mother and father say
Hello, Monica!,
my eyes sting open. There we are.

T
HE VAILLANCOURTS ARE CATLESS
but otherwise without flaw: mother, father, three girls, and a boy. Mr. Vaillancourt, a hydraulics man whose job is to prevent disaster, rotates through the mill's myriad departments on first shift with his tools and hardhat, looking the massive machinery up and down, thinking,
I'll fix you before you can break.
Mrs. Vaillancourt is pretty and kind and named Theresa, like our school, like my middle name, which I decide to start spelling with the French
h.

It hurts her some to see me here, quivering at the top of her stairs, asking
Is Denise home?,
craning to see into the kitchen. She, too, lost her father young, feels it afresh every time she hears the timorous knock and opens the door and it's me.

“Would you like to call home?” Mrs. Vaillancourt asks when suppertime comes and I make no move to leave. I want to stay so badly.

“Please, Mum,” I whisper into the Vaillancourts' receiver. What I don't say: I love it here. No cats but so what? I love this sense of order, the impossibility of catastrophe. Mr. Vaillancourt's in the
prevention
business. This seems like a place where nothing can go wrong.

“You're not being a pest?” Mum asks.

“No, Mum,” I tell her. “Honest. Mrs. Vaillancourt
asked.
”

“Well . . .” Mum says. She knows the Vaillancourts from church; they're good people, devout people. But in truth my mother doesn't want me at another mother's table. I ate here last night, too; will people think she's farming out her kids to keep them fed?

And there's this: She misses me.

“All right,” she says. “But come home right after.”

Mrs. Vaillancourt finds another chair in a kitchen no bigger than ours, adding a kid to the four already assembled, one of them so little she hasn't gotten the hang of a fork. When Mr. Vaillancourt presses us to converse in French, I feel grown-up, included in my pretend family practicing
s'il vous plaît
and
merci
and
passez le lait,
a good Catholic family unscarred by death. Despite the aprons we must wear to protect our clothes, supper here unfolds as a pleasing, chatty affair, and I even like the change in menu, most notably Mrs. Vaillancourt's “hamburg steak,” flattened ground beef baked on a cookie sheet and served up in rectangles with A-1 sauce. Yum.

Then I go home—content and vaguely guilty—to hug my mother hard.

Wednesday at the Vaillancourts: hamburg steak. Thursday at the Vaillancourts: American chop suey. Friday at the Vaillancourts: fish sticks with ketchup. On Saturday Mum insists that I ask Denise up for supper.

“Can't I go there? They invited me.”

“You have a home,” Mum says.

“But—”

“It's polite to return favors. That's what well-brought-up children do.”

First I have to walk to Fisher's to pick up something special—pork chops. We're having pork chops with applesauce. Then Mum sends me back out again, this time all the way “down the corner” to Sampson's, our first and only supermarket, because she's run out of something that's nobody's business and the clerks at Sampson's aren't as likely to know me as one of the Wood girls.

Returning home for the second time, I round the corner and—

Oh, shoot.

The Norkuses are out.

Our landlords have installed themselves at their post—the first-floor landing—whence they can surveil, like perched owls, the stairs and the driveway and the garden and the mailboxes and the trash shed. Mr. Norkus—we call him Jurgis—can be gruff and bewildering, using ambiguous hand gestures to fatten up seemingly unrelated instructions. He rarely smiles, though on occasion, through layers of language and history and foreignness, he can surprise our whole block with a joke. As in, the last time Mrs. Hickey went to the store:

Where you go?

Fisher's. Chicken's on sale.

On sale 'cause they die themself! No have to kill! HAHAHA!

His wife—we call her Mrs. Norkus—is ancient and vaguely military in bearing, her command so absolute that even when she isn't guarding the landing I know the heat of her presence. She keeps watch through wind and rain and sleet and dark of night, support hose rolled down to the tops of her Keds. Her white duck-cloth hat, which on anyone else might add a note of whimsy, reminds me of a helmet from World War I, something she probably knows a thing or two about.

The Norkuses came to America with rags on their feet. That's how Mum and Dad had always told it, an oft-repeated detail from which I assembled a larger drama: disembarkment in a cold rain, the words
Mexico, Maine,
pinned to a rotting sleeve, the thronged and misty vista of New York Harbor. They'd stumbled stiff-kneed down a gangway, impossibly young and yearning to breathe free, a sepia-toned couple impossible to connect with the Technicolor czars who swivel their joint gaze toward me as I come up the driveway with my grocery bag.

“Hi,” I say. I bend to pat Tootsie, tightening my grip on the bag.

“Lazy poodie!” Jurgis yells. He means the cat, a white tumbleweed with gum-pink ears. “Lazy poodie!” he yells again, then a downpour of Lithuanian accompanied by laughter—or something—and a slashing gesture with his open palm.

Translation one: I am happy my cat pleases you. Is she not exquisite?

Translation two: I intend to chop off your head. Wait here while I prepare the cleaver.

“Uh . . .” I say. “Okay.”

Sister Ernestine had skipped right over Lithuania, its war-torn history, its imports and exports, and so I'm left with no map, no assigned reading, no worksheets that might help me understand the Norkuses. Mexico brims with Franco
mémères
and Italian
nonnas
and Irish grandmas who speak in burred English, but the Norkuses alone seem like visitors from another country.

Jurgis gives the cat a perfunctory pat and tromps down the stairs toward his backyard garden, leaving me alone with Mrs. Norkus. Alone.

“What you gut, Munnie?”

I freeze like a bunny in the brush.

“Munnie! What you gut?”

“Groceries,” I say, caught literally holding the bag.

Mrs. Norkus hooks the lip of the bag with one finger and peers in.
“Ash-ash, ticka-ticka, push-push.”
She shakes her head.

Mum has a secret and Mrs. Norkus knows what it is.

“She looked in the
bag
?” Mum fumes, flinging the goods onto our narrow counter, the bloody shame of it for all to see: beef kidney. Packaged in cardboard and cellophane.

Red. Pricey. Bite-size.

For the cat.

In the Norkuses' world, this petty crime against the frugal-minded, food-chain-respecting citizens of the United States of America is a mortal sin of profligacy, certainly for a new widow with three little girls and a monthly Social Security check. But Mum's a fool for animals, especially cats, and most especially Tom, our muscled, odoriferous, anvil-headed tabby who sits on the sewing machine all day staring into the birdcage. We have other cats, but Tom is Mum's loverman now, her gentleman caller, her heater in the bed, and she'll do anything to make him happy, upgrading his chow in unwitting increments until he's eating exotic cuts we have to ask for special.

The Norkuses, on the other hand, eat from the land. Even now, so early in the summer, their vegetable garden has thickened with frilly rows of carrots and beets, its perimeter trimmed with lacy stalks of dill, pumpkin-colored marigolds, and dark fronds of rhubarb. They separate this bounty from the yard (
No go in garden!
) with a gated wire fence lined with hydrangeas we call the snowball bushes. As Mum rages in the kitchen—“She looked in the
bag!
”—mortified at being exposed as a spendthrift, I steal out to our back porch and look down.

Jurgis is bent over, harvesting greens from the lettuce bed and weeding between clumps by hand. At the garden's northeast corner, just over the back fence, flourishes a second garden, equal in breadth, the one tilled by Margie's nana, Jurgis's sister. Like Jurgis, Margie's nana is out there, too, slow-moving between the beanpoles in her swishing cottons. The siblings do not speak, or wave, or even face each other over the stone's throw that separates them. Nana and Jurgis's only sign of kinship survives in their rainbow of vegetables, a paean to the motherland. They live close enough to call
I sveikata!
if one of them sneezes, but they've been hardened by family trespasses too fossilized to undo. Instead of forgiveness, they cultivate cabbages big as bowling balls, purple-black beets that dye your fingers pink, squashes the color of sunshine; and they harvest their prizes alone.

Such a mystery, these siblings who came through untold heartbreak to get here. In the wake of my own heartbreak I'd watched them prepare their plots back in May, the ground still tough and cold and marred by dirty blots of snow; they'd dug and dug, undaunted. And now, green things gush from the ground. Crouching behind the porch rail, I watch Jurgis nursing his garden, Nana nursing hers, these old, Lithuanian-speaking mysteries who grow such luscious things. Haunted by their slow motion, their bent backs, their profound silence, I feel in my own heart a bloom of pain, then rush back inside to my own broken family.

“The
nerve
!” Mum is saying, slapping pork chops into the electric frying pan. Little things knock her clean off her axis now. “The
nerve
of that woman!”

“Here,” Anne murmurs. “Let me.” It's actually too early to start supper—time slips around for Mum these days—so my sister turns off the pan, removes the chops, sets them on wax paper to salt and pepper them. Mum forgot.

She sits down hard. Why is she so angry? “I'd like to give them a piece of my mind,” she says. But she can't. She's afraid of being
evicted
—a new word since
deceased,
a word that can halt our
yes you did no you didn't
bickering in mid-shriek (“Are you two looking to get us
evicted
?”)—a word even more sinister than
strike.

“Can I go get Denise now?” I ask.

“Go ahead,” Mum says, composing herself. She's still fuming but doesn't want us to know.

I get there moments too late to watch Mr. Vaillancourt unpack his lunch pail, that coming-home ritual I love; he's been called back in, something wrong with the Number Five paper machine. I hide my little wallop of disappointment by telling Mrs. Vaillancourt that we're having pork chops special for Denise. Over here they're having meat loaf, which I hate but would eat anyway.

“Make sure to say thank you,” Mrs. Vaillancourt reminds Denise as we head out. “‘Thank you very much' is what you say.” We walk from her block to mine, around the mailbox and down Gleason Street and then Worthley Avenue and then—

Oh, shoot.

The Norkuses are back at their post, settled into chairs. Jurgis is reading the
Times;
Mrs. Norkus isn't.
“Ash-ash,”
she murmurs to her husband.

“Just act normal,” I tell my friend.

“What—?”

“Shh. Do what I do.”

We saunter up the driveway. We make a move for the stairs.

Jurgis lowers his newspaper with a menacing crackle. “No bring friend!” he growls. “Too much stairs!”

A squeak of shock from Denise, who rabbits back into the driveway and gapes at me, aghast. Now what? I look up, my mother so near and yet so far. Feigning indifference, I trudge over to my friend, my consolation, my supper guest, and whisper, “Pretend we're going back to your house.” We stroll away, then run the whole block in the opposite direction, ending up on the blind side of the house where even the Norkuses, who have more eyes than a fly, can't spot us. From here, we hatch a multistage plan for smuggling Denise past the border guards, splitting up like soldiers on a recon mission.