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Excerpt From the Sequel toChapter 1 Draft 5 Expulsion
I was getting kicked out of my life at thirteen. I was young but I’ve always been precocious. My parents were forced to move with me since I was at too tender an age to live on my own in a strange city. Our cleaning lady, a woman my father called ‘our Godsend,’ my mother called ‘her indispensable other self,’ and I called ‘Delores,’ said that I was lucky it was almost 1960. According to her, if it were 1860 I would have had to move on my own. She said I’d just be dropped at the city limits. If Delores couldn’t find something to upset you, she was always willing to go back a hundred years.
Frankly, I’d rather have moved on my own so she wasn’t really scaring me.
I stood in my bedroom with its blue toile wallpaper and matching bedspread for the last time. Delores and I were supposed to be packing up my room. The canopy bed had been dismantled and was propped in the corner. My mother said there wouldn’t be enough room for it in our modern bungalow since our new house had a lower ceiling.
Where were we moving—to a chicken coup?
While Delores and I were emptying my maple armoire, I glanced in the full-length mirror hung inside the door to see Delores and me throwing coat hangers on the bed. Delores had one of those Toni hair perms that gave her mousey brown hair a frizzed frontier of bangs. She was one of those people who thought if she just permed her bangs and two side curls, no one would notice the rest. She assumed that since she had tunnel vision, the rest of us did. She wore what she referred to as a ‘house dress,’ which zipped up the front. Over that she wore a full apron that she had to slip over her head. It was red with giant green rickrack trim and had a scene of nineteenth-century carolers in long dresses standing by a lamplight. It was clearly for Christmas, but she wore it all year round. She had on stockings that came just below her knee and blue flannel mules that she had worn in on the inside of each fallen arch so she had to drag her feet to keep them on.
Next to her was me. I had white blonde hair, was very tall and had no curves–not even in my calves. I resembled a Q-tip. When I told my mother I was hideous, she had insisted early teenage years were an ‘awkward stage’ and that soon I would ‘grow into myself’ – whatever that meant.
It was my job to take whatever clothes I’d outgrown and put them in a box for Warty, the woman who lived in the town dump and had giant cauliflower growths all over her body. Her body was so deformed she could wear children’s clothes. There was a box in the post office marked Warty where the townspeople donated their used clothes to her. As I threw my Catholic school uniforms in the box marked dust rags in thick black Magic Marker, I told Delores that I wouldn’t need my school uniforms anymore so she could cut them up for cleaning since I didn’t think that even Warty would be caught dead looking like she went to Hennepin Hall. Delores shook her head and warned me against being ‘Miss High and Mighty.’ She said someone needed to remind me that I wasn’t leaving this town in a blaze of glory. “You better mind what you go around saying about your school. Just remember they asked you to leave and it weren’t the other way around.” As she slammed items into boxes she continued, “Your parents are getting uprooted after building themselves up in this town. They worked so hard setting up a good business and a reputation to match.” Then she whispered in a barely audible tone something about me being better off left in the bulrushes. Delores’ specialty was whispering awful things about me just loud enough so I could catch the drift, but never really be able to pin it on her.
Didn’t I work in the business from five in the morning until ten at night since I was four? (Except when I was busy going to school and getting expelled.) There was no point taking Delores on. As my mother said, Delores simply didn’t appreciate my ‘unique qualities.’
I piled all of my ankle socks into the box marked Warty. Delores asked, “What, may I ask, is wrong with those socks?” She held up a white pair with scalloped cuffs and shook them like Willie, our dog, shook the rug when the mailman came. “Some are so new they still have the price tags on them.”
“Delores, for your information, it is almost 1960, not 1959. I am not wearing ankle socks to junior high school in Buffalo. No thirteen-year-old would wear ankle socks unless they were in the retard class.”
“Well, people in the retard class are still in their school,” she said as she marched out of the room and stood at the top of the stairs in the long, wide-planked wooden hallway and yelled down the winding staircase, “Mrs. McClure, Cathy is refusing to pack perfectly good clothes to take to Buffalo, as usual making my job nigh to impossible.”
“Oh dear,” my mother responded. She was busy downstairs directing the movers who were having trouble finding the kitchen boxes to load on the moving van. My mother was pointing out that she had packed that room in a Stride-Rite shoebox. She only had aspirin and a Dixie cup dispenser. If you have never cooked or had food in your house, it is a snap to pack up the kitchen.
I took this opportunity to lean over the newel post and yell, “Mother, I am not under any circumstances wearing ankle socks. No one wears them in grade seven. Arlene on American Bandstand wears white wool Adler socks or else squash heels and stockings. Believe me, I know what I’m doing.”
“Well Delores, if she isn’t going to wear them, there isn’t much point in dragging them to Buffalo with us. Besides, it might be nice for Warty to have some new socks instead of hand-me-downs.”
Delores shook her head as though my mother’s statement was a symptom of the ‘grand McClure problem.’ While dragging her mules back into my room, she muttered, “That Dr. Spock fellow was the ruin here, and make no mistake about it.”
I made a real show of slamming a red felt skirt with a black poodle appliqué with one sequin eye in profile onto the ‘Warty pile,’ while giving Delores a victorious arch of an eyebrow.
“Your poor mother, good woman that she is, thinks your style is cramped in this town. That is rich–rich I tell you.” As she closed a box carefully labeled, Cathy’s essential underwear, she continued, “You’re cramping this town, and it isn’t cramping you. You’re just going to have more trouble to choose from when you get to Buffalo. A leopard don’t change its spots.”
The radio began playing “You Talk Too Much” and I sang along, until she yelled over the din, “Well, it’s easy to be a big fish in a small sea. Just wait until you get to Buffalo. That's a town with sharks that eat fish your size. Now get out of here. You’re making more of a mess than you are helping.”
“Delores, not to brag, but just as a point of information: I already know people in Buffalo. I went to Buffalo to see Dr. Small every week and know everyone in his waiting room.
“Sure you do. A bunch of loonies. You stabbed poor Anthony MacDougall and he just barely made it out alive once you were finished with him.”
I guess she bought into Anthony’s version of that ancient fracas. “Delores, since you enjoy spreading rumours why not tell this one. I am going to Buffalo to be in an advanced class in grade seven. I’ll have finished high school before I’m even sixteen.”
“If you’re so dad-blasted smart, how come you’re the only girl in the whole town of Lewiston who was kicked out of school? I thought they liked smart girls in school. I thought they got rid of the dumb ones. Maybe you have gone and graduated already,” she said.
I continued throwing almost all of my clothes in the bin marked Warty. My father, a true lover of gadgets, had a machine called a Dymo which was a plastic tapewriter that looked like an alphabet gun that cranked out plastic labels. In his Dymo kit he had rolls of plastic in a multitude of colours and sizes. This machine was his all-time favorite. On the toothbrush rack, he attached the label ‘toothbrushes’. In another colour, he stuck each of our names under our toothbrushes. Since I was an only child with my own bathroom, this labeling seemed slightly over the top.
I hadn’t fully realized we were moving for, or because of, me until Delores drove the point home. As I threw my knee socks into the suitcase, the picture which had previously been an impressionist painting was now coming through with alarming clarity.
I had wrecked my parents’ lives.
My mother had said we were moving because Lewiston was too small for me and that Father Rodwick had suggested I was only going to get more restless. I would have said that he got a lot more ‘restless’ than I’d ever thought of being. Thank God neither my mother nor Delores knew anything about that. He’d said I needed a ‘special’ school in Buffalo that had academic challenge. My mother believed a Jesuit priest was at God’s right hand, so she said it was time to move on. My father’s drug store was sold and she said we were moving on to ‘new challenges.’
I could see that Delores’ version of reality really suited the facts more appropriately. I had stabbed Anthony McDougall in grade four. Of course, he asked for it, and I am the one who had to take the rap because I was a girl and had to go to Dr. Small’s. I thought that was ancient history, but I guess it was dredged up with the school expulsion. It hadn’t been my idea to put the vodka in Father Flanagan’s Holy Water font. It was Miranda’s. I didn’t drink it, he did. He got to stay on as the parish priest and his drunken sermon about driving the English out of Ireland was called ‘unfortunate,’ while I got kicked out of school and the rest of my life.
“Cathy’s Clown” came on the radio. I turned it up. I loved the Everly brothers. “Wake up Little Susie” was the first 45 I ever bought.
Delores got in her final hit, “You better listen to that platter mighty carefully. It’s Cathy’s clowning that got your parents run out of town. With your father taking up the collection every Sunday and all. Why, he might as well have been tarred and feathered after that spirits business—and I don’t mean the Holy Spirit.”
As we crept up the narrow winding road that rimmed the Niagara Escarpment in our new 1960 two-toned grey Plymouth Fury with its huge fins and new car smell, my father pressed the push-button gear forcing the car to leap, working hard to get us up the steep incline and out of our old life. The three of us sat silently as the radio played the Venture’s hit “Walk Don’t Run”.
As we followed the Allied moving van I kept rereading the motto on the back door of the orange truck that said, Leave the worrying to us. Two tall steel exhaust pipes rose in the air like minarets from both sides of the truck’s cabin. Each had a flap that kept opening, belching black smoke and then snapping shut, like the mouth of Ollie the dragon hand puppet on the Kukla, Fran and Ollie Show. The smoke mouths kept repeating the same phrase in unison: “It’s all your fault; it’s all your fault.”
I looked down at Lewiston as it slowly receded. The town was nestled against the rock cliff of the huge escarpment on one side, and bordered by the Niagara River on the other. The Catholic Church spire that cast such a huge shadow when you were within the town was barely visible from up here.
The sun was setting on the grey limestone cliff, setting it ablaze. As I squinted at the orange embers on the rock wall, the reflection off the rock face was so glaring I had to squint and look away. My childhood had gone up in flames.
When we reached the top of the escarpment and all I could do was look back, I had no idea that I was leaving the least troubled years of my life. Strange, since I was practically getting kicked out of town. I guess that says a lot about what would become my future. I, like the rest of America, was heading into the years of our most troubled history. As usual, I was going to be in the thick of it, but I didn’t know that then.
It was almost 1960. The era of the historical home in the small town was becoming itself– only historical. We were doing what millions of other people had done—we were migrating. The Okies left the dust bowl for water and we left for central school systems. Whatever the reason, we’d all left behind the rock and land that was a part of us.
Would I ever live anywhere again where everyone knew me—where I knew who I was? Would I ever again be Cathy McClure, the pharmacist’s daughter? I wasn’t any longer the little girl who worked in the drug store with her dad and delivered drugs all over the Niagara Frontier with Roy, the delivery car driver. Roy used to say if someone in Lewiston didn’t know us, then they were “drifters.”
After reaching the top of the escarpment, we continued on flat ground until the escarpment was only a dot in the distance. I looked in the mirror but you can never see valleys in the rearview mirror, so Lewiston disappeared. I could only ever after imagine it.
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