Even at six years old, I knew who the alcoholics were. They appeared at my mother’s monthly bridge club late, booze already on their breaths, shedding coats into my knobby arms as they bustled toward the blond-wood bar cart:
Cynthia Renfro, petite and pale, and Jan Wheeler, with her lean golfer’s body and intense brown eyes.
Bridge Club in 1963 involved two card tables in the pale green living room and one in the beige dining room, the dining table against the wall holding a buffet luncheon of dishes fashioned from gelatins, Campbell’s soups, and Miracle Whip. My mother specialized in Ginger Ale Salad, a concoction molded from lemon Jell-O and canned fruits, dressed in a pink sauce. The bar cart also held ginger ale, though no one drank it. Bridge Club women preferred martinis. Sometimes Cynthia and Jan arrived already clutching half-full rocks glasses from the country club ladies’ lounge, their olives impaled on miniature red swords.
My mother pressed me into service to deposit coats on my parents’ bed upstairs. In winter, the women wore furs. As their cackles and cigarette smolder swirled upwards, I threw myself repeatedly onto their coats, each bounce pushing me against the soft luxury of mink and sheared beaver. The coats smelled of smoke, perfume, and an animal tang the furrier hadn’t tamed out of them. I always draped Mrs. Gallop’s fox stole over the bedpost, its glass eyes glaring, mouth biting its own body. I sang to the fox under my breath, jumping onto the bed on the first word of each line:
HUSH little baby, don’t say a word,
PAPA’s gonna buy you a mocking bird.
IF that mocking bird won’t sing,
PAPA’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.
One afternoon as I dove onto the coats, I heard two women climbing the stairs. I slid off the furs and hid in the closet. Through the door crack I recognized Jan and Cynthia.
“I hate my life,” Jan slurred. “And I’m desperate to take off these damn clip earrings.”
“What’d you say?” asked Cynthia, taking a deep drag of her cigarette.
“Oh hell,” Jan said. “I said I like your earrings. What do you think I said?” “Sad again, are we?” said Cynthia. She stubbed her cigarette into an ashtray on the dresser. I could see Jan and Cynthia standing together, hugging. Suddenly they climbed onto the bed, lying on my diving spot, nose to nose. Then an unmistakable sound: the long, wet smack of a kiss. They rustled up from the bed, and I sensed their intimacy as they brushed off each other’s skirts and smoothed each other’s hair.
Jan began sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“You’re drunk, sister, and so am I, and you should—you need that appointment.”
“Yes, I promised,” Jan said. She rummaged for her coat under the glassy gaze of the fox. Her husband, president of All Citizens Bank and the wealthiest Bridge Club spouse, had given her an ankle-length sable that year. After the women left, I realized that I had witnessed these inexplicable things only because I had been misbehaving, performing my own secret acts. It was the first time I’d seen an adult cry, or two women kiss on the lips, but I could tell no one. Not only would I get in trouble, but somehow, I wasn’t sure how, it would be terrible for Jan Wheeler.
After that, Jan didn’t come to Bridge Club. My mother said the Wheelers had decided to spend the winter golfing in Florida. “I volunteered to babysit her sable coat while she’s gone,” she cracked. Later on, after Cynthia Renfro’s husband left town, Cynthia divorced him, got a job in retail, and stopped drinking. “More for the rest of us,” my mother pronounced. She wagged her finger at me. “At least until you start stealing my booze.” I was seven.
The summer I was nine, Cynthia’s daughter Debbie and I decided to play Fashion Show. Debbie’s mother was at work, mine at the beauty parlor. We wanted to take advantage of the full-length mirrors in my mother’s walk-in closet. Without permission, Debbie Renfro packed some of her older sister’s nicest clothes into a pink suitcase, dragging it several blocks down the sidewalk to my house. As we cut through the living room that warm afternoon, we discovered Jan Wheeler, sun-browned, barefooted, sable coat draped over a blue nightgown, standing as still as a mannequin.
“Is Doris here, girls?” she asked in a trembly voice. She hadn’t removed her white sunglasses, and when she talked, I could see a smear of lipstick on her front teeth.
I was startled into temporary silence, but Debbie seemed unfazed. “Oh hiya, Mrs. Wheeler,” she said. “Welcome to our fashion show.”
“My mom’s getting her hair done,” I said, recovering. “May I give her a message?”
Jan didn’t reply. She roamed the living room, asking again for Doris. “I need to see her,” she murmured. “Need to talk.” Then she knelt and lunged, dragging us both into a tight embrace. My face was shoved into the collar of the sable coat as her sunglasses clattered to the floor. Frightened, I inhaled Jan’s sweat-smell and liquor breath, pungent odors that overwhelmed the fur’s familiar scents.
“Stay young, beautiful girls,” she gurgled. “I hate you, so young.” She kissed our cheeks and foreheads repeatedly, murmuring again and again, “Beautiful, beautiful.” The smacking sound of her kisses reminded me of the kiss she’d exchanged with Debbie’s mother. Once she left, Debbie and I silently scrubbed the magenta lip marks off our faces with washcloths, watching ourselves in the bathroom mirror.
When we finished, Debbie went back to the living room and put on Jan Wheeler’s white sunglasses for Fashion Show. “How do I look?” she asked, prancing in fashion model poses. I glanced up but didn’t answer. I was busy packing Debbie’s sister’s clothes into the pink suitcase.
When my mother returned, I ran to her and threw my arms around her waist. She pried me loose. “Too hot for that,” she said. “You’ll ruin my spanking new hairdo.”
I never played with Debbie Renfro after that. For the rest of our school days, she and I traveled in different circles. Once we entered high school, I’d see Debbie in the halls and at her locker. Seeing her always reminded me of Jan Wheeler, of Bridge Club and the club members who’d died since the club disbanded, two victims of cancer and one of a car accident. Both Jan and Cynthia were still alive; my mother, one of the cancerous dead. I wasn’t glad that she’d died, but her perpetual sarcasm had stunted me. I focused on academic success and dreamed of a scholarship to an out-of-state school. I pictured myself bursting out of our pale-walled house and sprouting deep green tendrils and leaves, like a tropical plant.
Debbie, too, seemed to want to outgrow her roots, but her vision of success involved seeking popularity of various types. By March of our senior year, she’d left the pompon squad for pregnancy, highlighting her round belly in tight clothes and making out with her boyfriend Lyle in his Mustang over her lunch period. One Saturday she spotted me in K-Mart before I could escape. She beckoned me to a table of ladies’ underwear.
“Hey there,” she said. “Looky what I got.” She splayed her left hand atop a row of pastel panties and waggled her ring finger. It bore a thin silver band decorated with an errant flake of glitter. “Lyle and me are engaged.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “So many changes at once. Must be exciting.” “Oh, it is. All my dreams coming true at the same time,” she said patronizingly.
“We’re even buying us a cute little house over on Allen Street.”
“Wow, Debbie,” I said, genuinely surprised. Lyle was only two years out of high school and worked third shift at the Wirecraft plant, and I didn’t think Debbie’s mother had the money for another house. “How’d you swing that?”
“Mr. Wheeler at All Citizens approved a loan with a super low interest rate. He said Lyle showed tremendous potential at work and deserved a leg up. He even loaned us the whole down payment,” Debbie said.
I was no expert in bank lending, but I felt certain the loan was not arranged for Lyle and Debbie based on Lyle’s potential. Perhaps Mr. Wheeler was a stand- in for the real benefactor. Fortunately, Debbie was too stupid to figure it out, but her mother probably had. I wondered what emotions it evoked in Cynthia Renfro.
I escaped to an out-of-state college after high school graduation, but my father’s failure of imagination landed me at a small Catholic women’s school. I tried to bloom where I was planted, but there was something wrong with the soil, something off-putting about the chasteness of the rules and the silliness of dorm gossip. I sneaked instead to parties at the state university on the other side of town, where boys pushed me into dark corners, their beer-breath clouding my face, their thick fingers mashing the polyester of my shirts. I avoided the booziest of them; at eighteen years old, even drunk myself, I knew who the alcoholics were.
Home for the Christmas holidays in 1976, my sophomore year, I found the local evening newspaper under my father’s living room coffee table and read it out of boredom, surprised to see Jan Wheeler’s obituary. No photo accompanied it, and it didn’t reveal how she’d died. The funeral home visitation was in three days.
That evening, as I scrounged in the kitchen for something to make for dinner, I studied my mother’s cookbook shelf, untouched since her death. I found a spiral- bound paperback bearing the title Thelma Wagner’s Cookbook of the Air, recipes assembled by a local radio personality. The cookbook evoked memories of Bridge Club buffets; it even included, with attribution, my mother’s Ginger Ale Salad. A handwritten inscription read:
December 1963
To Doris –
Merry Christmas and thanks to the kindest and most tactful broad I know.
Love, Jan W.
At first, I assumed it was a joke; my mother had been tactless, and kind wasn’t the first word that came to mind. But the Jan Wheeler of 1963 hadn’t seemed to be a joker. What had my mother known? How had she been kind?
My discovery of the cookbook propelled me to Jan Wheeler’s wake. I told my father I was seeing a friend from high school, though I had not kept up with anyone. Only a few other visitors milled about in the room. I greeted Jan’s husband, a sad, wizened man. I wondered whether he’d learned what I’d learned about Jan so long ago, whether his gifts of a sable coat and golf trips to Florida came with conditions, and what the real terms of the loan to Debbie might have been.
I’d prepared myself to see Jan in her casket, imagining magenta lips stretched into artificial repose by an undertaker, the majestic sable coat draped over her body. But the visitation was nearly over, and the undertaker had already closed the casket.
As I walked away from it, a petite, blonde woman of my mother’s vintage paused ahead of me at a bank of flowers. I knew immediately she was Cynthia Renfro, though I hadn’t seen her since my mother’s funeral. I approached her softly, more to observe than to converse, but she turned and looked me squarely in the face. She seemed not to recognize me, so I told her my name.
Her bloodshot eyes crinkled. Despite her otherwise tidy appearance, shadowy half-moons of mascara had washed to her lower eyelids. I explained I was there because I felt I ought to represent my mother.
“I miss your mother,” Cynthia said. “She was a good friend to Jan.”
We remained together, gazing at a basket of white lilies. On the other side of the casket, men began to move the larger floral arrangements out of the room. I thought it a signal to leave, but Cynthia suddenly spoke again.
“I haven’t seen Jan for many years.” I turned my head to look at her profile and saw that she’d closed her eyes. “Jan did me a big favor a little while ago. I took it the wrong way.” She opened her eyes, still facing the flowers, and sighed. “By then I wasn’t close to her anymore.”
“It happens sometimes,” I said.
Cynthia patted me on the arm. “Well. We do what we have to do, don’t we, doll.” She looked back at the casket, then moved toward the exit, extracting a cigarette from her purse as she reached the door.
I wasn’t ready to go yet. I sat in the back and closed my eyes, my thoughts the closest I could come to prayer for the one who’d died. I recalled the long-ago Fashion Show and the feel of the magenta kisses on my face. I reflected on the cookbook inscription, and on Cynthia Renfro’s words in the nearly-empty funeral home. I realized that I’d sprouted new shoots as I’d hoped, even if sometimes the tendrils curled back to familiar places. But despite her money and her golf trips, Jan Wheeler hadn’t. People don’t behave as she did without the tough, stinging thorns of old growth piercing their skin.
I wished then that I’d seen Jan again in spite of how uncomfortable she’d made me. I would have liked to touch her coat once more to become less fearful of it. I would have liked to witness my salty mother’s tact and kindness towards Jan, qualities she had somehow summoned once for a friend in need of sweetness. I would have liked to whisper to Jan, as if it would mean anything, that I won’t say a word.
Mary Hannah Terzino’s stories have been published in the Forge Literary Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Quartz Literary, Lumiere Review, and the Lakeshore Review, among other places, and her essays on the writing life have appeared in Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. Her story “Blank Slate” won first place in Fiction Factory’s 2021 annual flash fiction contest and she was a finalist for a fellowship from the Forge Literary Magazine for writers over 50 in 2018. Currently she is completing a short story collection, Secrets and Other Hobbies, for publication. She lives overlooking the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck, Michigan, where she writes prose and sings in a community chorus. Website: www.maryhannahterzino.com
