I endured yet another loss that autumn of 1962; the Cuban missile crisis dealt the final blow to my friendship with May Elizabeth. The crisis intensified the hatred and fear that people felt toward Communists, so even though a nuclear war had been averted, May acted as if it had been my fault that she’d spent a long weekend in her fallout shelter.
There were plenty of other reasons, too. We were in junior high now, and she had much more in common with Debbie Harris, who teased her hair and flirted with boys and listened to Peter, Paul and Mary records— than she did with me. May and I attended most of the same classes and our lockers stood right next to each other, but she acted as if I didn’t exist. I should have known that our friendship couldn’t survive. Hadn’t I heard anything Uncle Leonard had tried to preach to me all these years about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? Sometimes I wished that the world had come to an end while I was eating roast beef in Deer Falls with my grandmother.
Our regional school district bussed kids into town for junior high and high school from all the neighboring villages. We now had 101 kids in our grade instead of forty-seven. May Elizabeth found a whole new set of friends to hang out with, cool girls who wore training bras and garter belts and nylons. Her Sunday shoes had tiny little heels on them now. I went back to being “Cootie Kathy” because I didn’t dress in the right clothes or wear my hair in a flip. It was hard to get my hair to do much of anything since we were always running out of shampoo and I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap in the rust-stained bathroom sink.
My daddy made parole that winter, and he stayed home for the longest period of time that I could ever recall. He supposedly had a job in Bensenville and rode there with Uncle Leonard every day. I didn’t ask him where he worked. I didn’t want to know. I was still mad at him for being an exconvict, and I refused to cuddle up with him or let him try to cheer me up. Besides, he had a full-time job trying to cheer up Annie. Whatever Daddy’s day job was, I don’t think he liked it very much because he came home tired and sad every night. It seemed like we all walked around for the next few years acting gloomy and woebegone. Mommy, Uncle Leonard, and Annie had always been morose, but now Daddy and I joined their pity party.
The gloom deepened a year later when President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. I remember walking home from eighth grade and finding my mother sitting in front of the TV set, crying. “Somebody just shot President Kennedy,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it. “Why?” I asked.
That question continued to occupy the nation for years. We were all sad, even Uncle Leonard, who had disliked President Kennedy long before the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Still, it’s a shocking thing,” he murmured.
“Shocking.”
We watched TV for days it seemed, feeling numb and listening to the news commentators talk on and on about the Texas Book Depository and the grassy knoll and Lee Harvey Oswald. We saw rerun after rerun of Jackie Kennedy in her pillbox hat and blood-splattered pink suit, looking grief-stricken and hollow. When Lee Harvey Oswald’s Communist ties were discovered, Uncle Leonard feared a backlash and worried that he would have to leave town again.
I went to church one Sunday morning and came home to find Daddy wild-eyed and raving, pointing to the TV set and shouting, “Somebody just shot Lee Harvey Oswald! I sat right here and saw it live on TV! They shot him right in front of me!”
We watched the president’s funeral procession, deeply moved by the riderless black horse with the empty boots turned around in the stirrups. The poise and courage of his young widow, Jacqueline, inspired us; the tragedy and poignancy of little John-John’s salute touched us. I mourned, not only for John F. Kennedy, but for all that he had represented. He had been a man of power, handsome and strong, blessed with a beautiful wife, adorable children, wealth, and respect. My family was nothing at all like his, and I would never have any of the things he had. But for a little while, I had almost felt as if I did. The Kennedys were the all-American ideal, our nation’s shining First Family, and in them we had tasted perfection. Now that ideal had been violently destroyed, the perfect life I so longed for cruelly snatched away by an assassin’s bullet. It had been only a dream.
For most of the young people in Riverside, the gloom finally lifted a few months later when the Beatles landed in America in February of 1964. By then, our TV was so decrepit that Ed Sullivan looked as though he was stranded in a raging blizzard, buffeted by gale-force winds that blew him up to the top of the screen, then tossed him to the bottom again. But when I watched his show one Sunday night and saw the Beatles singing “IWant to Hold Your Hand,” I fell in love with Ringo Starr. Yeah, yeah, yeah!
The next day, all the boys came to school with their hair combed down over their foreheads. The girls starting buying Beatles records and listening to their music on transistor radios and reading all about John, Paul, George, and Ringo in fan magazines. I didn’t have a record player or a radio, let alone money for fan magazines. Any knowledge I had of the Fab Four had to come secondhand through the scraps of information I overheard in the school hallways. I lay on my mattress at night, fantasizing about how I would miraculously meet Ringo Starr and be whisked away to live happily ever after in his mansion in England. But I would be magnanimous with my newfound wealth; I would buy my family a new TV set as a parting gift.
I started high school in 1964 and entered an entirely different world from junior high. Nevertheless, it was still a world in which I was shunned and excluded. During our high school years May Elizabeth’s life and mine took two entirely different courses, as if we lived in parallel universes on The Twilight Zone. May and her friends were cheerleaders and had boyfriends and went steady. She was voted homecoming queen and rode to the football field in a convertible, holding a bouquet of roses and waving her gloved hand like the Queen of England. I didn’t actually see this performance since I never went to football games, but her picture appeared in the school newspaper.
May’s brother, Ron, was the star quarterback, the captain of the basketball team, the prom king. He drove a red V–8 Mustang, and pretty girls swarmed all around him. My brothers drove the town constable to drink, and the only things that swarmed around Poke and JT were allegations. If anything was missing, demolished, dented, looted, or burned, the blame fell on the Gallagher boys. They had turned into regular hoodlums: shooting out streetlights with slingshots, soaping car windows, exploding firecrackers in mailboxes, stealing candy and comic books and squirt guns from the Valley Food Market and Brinkley’s Drugstore.
“The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I heard people saying. “The father is no good and neither are the sons.” And they were right. I was old enough and wise enough to understand what was going on when Poke and JT would go “shopping” in Bensenville with Daddy. He had trained them well. The poor store clerks were so busy keeping an eye on the two little street toughs that no one noticed Donald Gallagher stuffing all kinds of things up his sleeves and inside his coat.
“You need anything from the store, Kathleen?” he would ask as he and the boys piled into the rusted Ford.
“No, thanks.” My hair always felt dirtier when I washed it in stolen shampoo.
While the other kids went to football games and basketball games, I worked in the Riverside Diner washing dishes. With my mousy brown hair and skinny body and flat chest, I wasn’t cute enough or perky enough at age sixteen to be a waitress, so they kept me hidden in the back. The diner was the town hangout, and all the kids congregated there after the games for hamburgers and French fries and milk shakes. Sometimes I would hear May Elizabeth’s tinkling laughter above the roar of the dishwasher, and I’d catch a glimpse of her through the pass-through window when I brought the cook a stack of clean plates.
She was beautiful now, blonde and fair-skinned. Her pudginess had shifted around on her growing body and settled into voluptuous curves. She was always the center of attention, always animated and dramatic. I wished her well. I envied her. I knew I could never be like her.
I hated myself so much that I finally stopped looking in the mirror. I hated my scrawny, underdeveloped body and my stringy hair and my baggy, thrift-store clothes. I hated the way my clothes smelled and the way my house smelled and the way I smelled after working a shift in the diner’s greasy kitchen. I had no girlfriends, let alone boyfriends. I went to school, sat in class without ever saying a word, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria, and walked home alone. No one noticed that I never attended a school dance or a football game or hung around the diner afterward. No one said, “Hey, where’s Kathleen Gallagher? We should see if she wants to come along.” No one noticed that I stopped attending Sunday school and didn’t join the confirmation class and never went to church anymore. No one cared.
I hated my life.
I fought with my mother constantly. For as long as I could recall, she had taken my brothers’side in every argument and had looked the other way while they wrecked everything I owned. But the last straw came when the boys stole my new padded training bra and let Charlie Grout see it for a dollar. Thanks to Poke and JT, everyone in Riverside High School knew that Cootie Kathy wore falsies.
“I don’t have any privacy!” I screamed at my mother. “I’m sick and tired of sharing a bedroom with my perverted brothers!” I had entered womanhood, and I wanted to be able to shave my legs in peace without my brothers charging admission so their friends could peek through the hole where the bathroom doorknob should be.
“What do you expect me to do about it?” my mother said. “Build another room?”
I knew she would never take any action, so I took action myself. Uncle Leonard had moved in with his girlfriend after Daddy came home, so I decided that Poke and JT should sleep in our uncle’s old “bedroom” in the living room. I dragged their mattress and pillows down the hall and stuffed all their clothes, slingshots, matches, and other stolen loot in Uncle Leonard’s cardboard “closet” behind the couch. The boys didn’t seem to care in the least that they had been relocated. They slept on the living room floor half the time, anyway. A mattress simply made it more comfortable.
I had a small measure of privacy at last, and to celebrate I bought a hook-and-eye lock at the cluttered Village Hardware Store and installed it myself with Daddy’s screwdriver. Not that a lock had ever stopped my brothers, but I hoped it would slow them down a bit.
During my junior year of high school my figure finally began to change, and I outgrew most of my clothes. I barely had adequate clothing to begin with, but the fact that my mother didn’t have the money or the energy to go to the Laundromat on a regular basis made the situation critical most of the time.
“Look at this,” I told her, modeling the gaping buttons of my “good” cotton blouse. “I need new clothes.”
“I’ll ask Leonard to drive you to the thrift store in Bensenville.”
“I hate thrift-store clothes. They stink like wet sheep dogs! Why can’t I buy something new just once in my life?”
“You think you’re better than the rest of us? You think you deserve to have new clothes while we have to make do with secondhand?”
“You could buy some new clothes once in a while, too,” I griped. “Why do you have to look like a bag lady all the time? Why can’t you be like other mothers?”
“I’ve had about all I can take from you,” she said. “I don’t think you deserve a trip to the thrift shop. You can go without until you change your attitude.”
I might have gotten more sympathy from Daddy, but I refused to ask him. I knew how he “shopped,” and I didn’t want it on my conscience if he wound up back in the county correctional center because I needed new clothes. Besides, I would feel even more ashamed walking around in stolen clothes than if I wore clothes from the thrift store. As time passed, my wardrobe became more and more meager, my arguments with my mother fiercer and more frequent.
“Can you please sign this?” I asked her one afternoon. “I want to take driver’s ed next semester.” I showed her the consent form, holding my breath as she reached the bottom line and saw the enrollment fee and learner’s permit fee.
“No. We can’t afford it.”
“I’ll pay for it out of the money I make at the diner. Please… all you have to do is sign the permission slip.”
“I already said no. It’s a waste of time and money since we don’t have a car for you to drive.”
“Maybe Uncle Leonard will let me drive his car.”
“I’ve gotten by just fine without a driver’s license all these years, and so can you.”
The helplessness and hopelessness I felt enraged me. “I hate living here and I hate this family and I hate you!” I screamed. “I’m going to go live with Connie and Uncle Leonard.” I never thought I would say that; it was a measure of my desperation that I’d choose to live with my Communist uncle and his common-law wife. By now they had dated for almost seven years and had lived together at least half of that time. If Connie was still hoping for wedding bells to ring, she was in for a big disappointment. Uncle Leonard said marriage was for fools and capitalists.
My mother was unmoved by my declarations of hatred or my threats to move away. “That’s out of the question,” she said. “Connie Miller is a simpleton. There’s only one reason why men are attracted to women like her.”
I had a pretty good idea what that reason was.
I had to blame someone for the rotten life I lived, and since my mother was handy, I decided that it was all her fault. We had learned about alcoholism in health class, and I had begun to wonder if my mother secretly drank. Maybe that’s what she’d been doing in the outhouse all these years—although it remained a mystery to me how she could afford to buy alcohol when we couldn’t even afford groceries. Mom was always weak and exhausted, and her eyes drooped half-shut no matter how much sleep she got. She never had enough energy to cook a meal or clean the house or keep my brothers out of trouble.
I decided that if she wasn’t such a frumpy recluse, maybe I wouldn’t be ostracized in school. If she still lived in Deer Falls with Grandma Fiona, at least I would have a nice apartment that smelled like lavender instead of mold and urine. I was sullen and mouthy and bitter. No matter what Mom said to me, I had three standard replies: “Why should I?” or “What do you care?” or “I wish you weren’t my mother.”
Her response rang through our bungalow in a monotonous refrain:
“I’ve had about all I can take from you. …”
I hated my life. I would sit in my room for hours, crying and crying, unable to stop. No one came in to ask me what was wrong. I thought about running away at least three times a week. One of those times was because she refused to let me go to Washington, DC, on our senior class trip—even if I paid for it with my own money.
“I’m leaving home and never coming back!” I yelled.
“Go ahead. How far do you think you’ll get?”
“I’ll go to Deer Falls and live with Grandma Fiona.”
My mother got a funny look on her face. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was, then I saw tears glistening in her eyes just before she turned her head away, and I realized that it was grief.
“Your grandmother’s dead.” I heard bitterness in her voice.
I had only met Fiona that one time, but when I thought of my beautiful, elegant grandmother sipping sherry and listening to her scratchy phonograph records, I felt her loss as keenly as if I had visited her only yesterday.
“No! You’re lying! How did she die? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t we ever go visit her again before it was too late?” My voice rose in volume and pitch with each question. But my mother simply shook her head and went outside to her sanctuary, slamming the kitchen door. I went out the front door, slamming it, too.
I crossed the bridge and walked through Riverside, not caring where I ended up. I felt like lying down on the grass in the cemetery and waiting to die like Sarah Hawkins. I would have done it, too, but we didn’t own a cemetery plot and the groundskeeper would probably run me off for trespassing.
Tears spilled down my cheeks. My grandmother had made me feel loved—and loveable—and now she was gone forever. I was so mad that I wanted to beat somebody up. When I saw my uncle’s car in the street outside their apartment, I ran upstairs and banged on the door. They lived in two cramped rooms above the Valley Food Market, where Connie worked.
I confronted Uncle Leonard with the question the moment Connie invited me inside. “When did Grandma Fiona die?”
Uncle Leonard exhaled and all the life seemed to go out of his gangly body, as if the puppeteer had dropped the strings. He leaned against the sink in Connie’s tiny kitchenette. “More than four years ago—a few months after we visited her, in fact.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You hardly knew her,” he said defensively.
“I did too know her! She was my grandmother! I would’ve gone to her funeral!”
“There was no funeral. They’re a waste of money. Funerals are for fools who believe in God and an afterlife.”
That was more than I could take. To think of lovely Fiona, unmourned, unloved, thrown into the garbage bin—or wherever Communists stashed their dead loved ones—was a bitter blow.
“How could you do that?” I yelled. I was trembling with fury and grief.
“Grandma Fiona believed in God, and so do I!”
“For goodness’sake, sweetie. Calm down,” Connie said. She looked worried. “Take a deep breath, have a drink of water.”
“No! I want my grandma!”
Fiona had been the only person who had ever loved me. I could tell that she did by the way she looked into my eyes when she talked to me, and by the way she touched my hair and cupped her soft, wrinkled hand on my cheek. I remembered all the pretty things she’d had and how she had let me try on her necklaces and rings. Now she was gone forever, and I didn’t have anything to remember her by.
“What did you do with all her stuff?”
“I took care of it,” Uncle Leonard said coldly.
“Isn’t there anything of hers left? A bracelet… something…? ” My eyes burned and my face was slick with tears, but I couldn’t stop crying.
“It was all useless junk, Kathleen. It’s gone.”
“I hate you!” I screamed. I went after him with my fists, pummeling his chest, trying to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. He was stronger than he looked. He gripped my wrists so tightly they ached, as he held me away from him.
“I think I’d better take you home.”
“No, I don’t ever want to go home again,” I sobbed. “Especially with you!”
Connie did the best thing anyone could have done. She nudged my uncle away and pulled me into her arms and let me cry. “Go away, Leonard,” she said over my shoulder. “Can’t you see she’s heartbroken? Leave the poor girl with me.”
Uncle Leonard left. Connie made soothing noises as she held me tightly, listening as I vented all of my hatred and rage. When I finally calmed down, she made me a cup of hot chocolate and a grilled cheese sandwich. I slept on her couch that night.
The next day was a Saturday, and she made French toast with butter and syrup. She put a rock-and-roll station on the radio just for me, and we danced to the Beatles in our bare feet.
“Can I live here with you, Connie?” I asked when it was time for her to go downstairs to work. “I don’t ever want to go home again.”
“I would love to say yes, sweetie. I’ve always wanted children of my own, you know. But you need to go home to your family.”
“Why don’t you get married and have some, then?”
She smiled sadly as she slipped her shop apron over her head and tied it around her ample waist. “The only man I’ve ever loved is your Uncle Leonard. And he doesn’t want any children.” I could see that this was a painful subject for her, so I let it go.
“I may not see you again,” I told her as I hugged her good-bye. “I’m going to run away.”
“Please don’t do that,” she said softly. “I quit school and ran away when I was sixteen, and now I wish I hadn’t. I never finished my education, so I can never better myself. I’m forty-three years old, and all I have to show for it is a tiny apartment, a job in a grocery store, and a man who doesn’t love me enough to marry me. But you’re a bright girl, Kathleen—a pretty girl. You can get a college education and get out of this nowhere town and make something of yourself. That’s the best way to show them, honey… not by running away.”
I knew deep inside that Connie was right. Besides, I doubted that my family would even come looking for me if I disappeared. The nearsighted town constable would be no help, either. He’d be overjoyed to have one less thieving Gallagher in town. Not knowing what else to do or where to go, I returned home to my miserable life.
I used the money I earned at the diner to apply to colleges. I had straight A’s in algebra, trigonometry, geometry and calculus, and my math teacher, Mr. Mueller, encouraged me to apply to Albany State University and major in mathematics.
“Your Regents’exam scores make you eligible for a New York State Regents’Scholarship,” Mr. Mueller told me. “Depending on your family’s financial need, you might qualify for full tuition.” I assured him that I would qualify. The only problem would be paying for my room and board.
I was going to graduate third in my class, and with high SAT scores, I was easily accepted at Albany State. My goal was within sight. This would be the last year I would ever have to spend in Riverside, walking around with my head down. All I ever wanted was to leave home and never return.
Only one last detail remained, and I avoided taking care of it for as long as I possibly could, hoping for a miracle. No matter how many ways I added up my financial aid package from Albany State, there was still a gap between what I owed and what I had managed to save on my own. I had been awarded the mathematics prize at graduation and a small student council scholarship, but I was still short for room and board, plus books and various activity fees. The financial aid officer at the college had included student loan forms for me to fill out to cover the difference. All I needed was someone to cosign them for me.
I didn’t ask Daddy. The signature of a paroled felon probably wouldn’t carry much weight, and I was afraid that Daddy would be dumb enough to rob a bank for me if he knew that I needed money. After all, the last time that I had asked him for something, he had stolen a Christmas tree.
I didn’t ask Uncle Leonard, either, because I already knew what he thought of the capitalistic public education system.
“It ought to be free, like it is in Communist countries,” he’d said a dozen times. In his mind a free education was more important than freedom of thought or freedom of speech or freedom of worship. Yes, I knew better than to ask him. Or Connie. She was a sweet soul, but she would never defy Uncle Leonard. That left my mother as my only resource. I waited until she was home alone, then went to where she lay sprawled on the couch and handed her the loan papers and a pen.
“I need you to sign this for me. It’s for college.”
“What is it?” She looked at it through sleepy, half-closed eyes. She couldn’t seem to muster the energy to hold the pen much less sign her name.
“It’s for a loan that I can pay back after I graduate.”
“I thought you had a scholarship?”
“I do—for full tuition. And I can pay for most of my room and board with a campus job. But I need a loan to make up the difference.” She started slowly shaking her head, and I felt my temper flare. “I’ll pay it all back! I just need your signature!”
“Why do you want to go to a snooty, expensive school like that? What’s wrong with the community college over in Bensenville?”
“Mom, please! Albany State is a much better school!”
“You’ll be out of place there. It’s a school for rich kids. The boys you’ll meet there would never marry someone from our background. At least at the community college there will be others like you. You could live at home and save room and board.”
“No!” I wailed. I sank down on the living room floor in front of the couch. “I don’t want to marry someone from our background. I’d rather not get married at all! And I don’t want to live in Riverside for one more minute. Don’t you understand that? I know Daddy is a convicted criminal.” She appeared startled. “I learned the truth a long time ago,” I continued. “And I hate the way everyone looks at us and whispers about us behind our backs. I want to get out of here and go as far away as I can and start a new life all over again—like you did.”
“You don’t know a thing about me—” she began, but I shouted her down.
“I know that you left Grandma Fiona and ran away from Deer Falls and never went back! All my life people have been telling me to get good grades and get a college education so I could make something of myself— and now I’m so close! If you would just cosign this loan for me, you’ll never have to see me again as long as you live!”
My mother closed her eyes and slowly tore the form in half.
“No!” I screamed.
“I’ll get you the money,” she said quietly. I scrambled to my feet and pulled the mangled papers out of her hands.
“How? Are you going to steal it, like Daddy? Well, don’t bother! I’m leaving home and never coming back!”
I packed my meager belongings in the suitcase Connie had given me for a graduation present, and left. I was so angry and frustrated that I walked out to the county highway and hitched a ride to Bensenville with a car full of hippies. They dropped me off at the Greyhound station, and I caught a bus to Albany the next day. By the time I reached the campus, I had pieced the loan form together with tape and forged my mother’s signature on it. A receptionist guided me to an information board, and within two days I had found a house full of hippies who were looking for another roommate, and a summer job at a coffee shop close to campus. My working hours were from five-thirty in the morning until one-thirty in the afternoon, so I was able to work a second job washing dishes at a restaurant from four o’clock in the afternoon until closing. I worked myself to exhaustion every day that summer, but I didn’t care. Nobody knew the old Kathleen Gallagher who’d had cooties and a Communist uncle and a thieving father. I was starting life all over again.
Two weeks after moving to Albany, I came home to my apartment after a long shift at the restaurant and saw Uncle Leonard’s beat-up car parked at the curb. It could have been any one of my family members, since they all used his car. Even Poke took it for joyrides whenever he felt like it, never caring that he was only fourteen.
But when I got closer I saw Uncle Leonard himself sitting on the front stoop with his head in his hands. He looked like a cadaver in the yellowgreen light of the street lamp. He saw me approaching and stood.
“Kathleen… something terrible has happened,” he said. He gripped my arms, and I wasn’t sure if he was holding me up or leaning on me for support. I waited the longest moment of my life.
“Your mother is dead.”