Of Fate, Francophiles, and The Thing: Part 2 of Growing up in St. Louis

The S. family's tale did not end happily, but wherever Kathy is now, I hope that she is happy and well. Joyce was three years older than Kathy and I, and she was dead by the time she was sixteen. It was my first experience with death, with attending a funeral, with knowing that person in the coffin, and I have never been able to reconcile myself to the experience, to this day avoiding all funerals as much as I am able. Although I don't truly recall all the details, I remember my mother telling me that Joyce and Kathy had been out joy riding in a car with their boyfriends (yes, Kathy's independence and experiences with boys by the time she was twelve catapulted her into years beyond my twelve-year-old world). I can't recollect if alcohol was involved, but high speed was. The car they were in flipped and turned over on the four occupants, throwing Joyce out from and under the car as it rolled, crushing her and breaking her neck. Kathy was thrown to the floor of the car which probably saved her life.

Perhaps it just wasn't the accident or Joyce's death that so profoundly affected me, but the fact that she was so close to me and so young. Like her sister, she was a beautiful girl with a dazzling smile and a face filled with joy. The end of her felt like one of the princesses in my storybooks had been wiped from existence for no apparent reason and unlike Snow White, no kiss would bring her back. Another part of the incident that cast an eerie spell over Joyce's death and funeral, weaving itself into my psyche, was the request she made of her mother just days prior to the accident. Barbara was in the kitchen cooking breakfast when Joyce came out from her sleeping quarters and wrapped her arms around her mother's waist. "Mom," she said sleepily. "I had a nightmare." Her mother asked, What was it? "I dreamt I had died and I wore a beautiful, black lace dress for my funeral. If I die, promise you'll dress me in black lace like that, please?" And so, Barbara did. Nothing in my thirteen years had prepared me for what I witnessed. Joyce's face had been carefully reconstructed, her blond hair washed and brushed, and a black lace dress wrapped what was left of her body. Upon seeing her in the coffin, I began to fall to my knees. My father, who attended the funeral with me, quickly grabbed me around the waist and led me outside where I sobbed and heaved into the bushes while he stroked my back. At that point, I wondered why anyone would ever want to say good-bye to someone they loved in that way. Rather, I wanted to remember Joyce playing dress up with Kathy and me, adorning us in scarves and old jewelry like we were two dolls. I wanted to cling to the memory of her sharing a Halloween Hershey bar with me and smiling as she wiped the chocolate from around my upper lip and winking. "Don't tell I gave you this. Don't want your mama mad at me," she laughed. I wanted to envision her long, light blond hair blowing in the breeze around her face like a sunlit halo while we raced our bikes down hills, Joyce laughing with such abandonment it filled my stomach with glee. Joyce was filled with laughter. While we danced on the front porch, she the leader and Kathy and I her students, she laughed. When we stepped in cow dung as we ran through the pastures, she laughed. When we roamed the streets on Halloween night, all three of dressed as gypsies, her laughter rang through the darkness. I can still hear it. I pray that somewhere she is still laughing.

Some years ago, my father had communicated with one his friends from the old neighborhood whereupon he discovered that Barbara had died and Tony, the oldest son had taken off for places unknown. Because Sedge was probably close to my father's age and Dad had spoken to his old friend when he was in his sixties, I assume Sedge was also around that age when Dad received the news. My father was told that Sedge was pretty much left with the family house, what was left of his property, and the motel he had eventually built on . I don't know where Kathy lived or what she was doing at the time, but with Joyce and Barbara dead and Tony gone he apparently, lonely and despondent, picked up his hunting rifle, loaded it, and positioned it under his chin, then pulled the trigger. And with that, he too, was gone.

The memories of the family are as vivid as if it all had happened yesterday. Sedge and Barbara were a young couple fresh out of the hills of Tennessee with hopes and dreams no different from those of my parents or any of the other young people who felt post-World War II was filled with promise, but their story reminds us that no era secures happiness for all. Sedge and Barbara loved one another and loved their children. They worked hard and never had an unkind word for anyone. I was thirteen going on fourteen and Joyce's death represented the end of an epoch for me. With her funeral, I experienced the loss of not just someone I had loved, but the loss of innocence. A kind of cruel reality punched into the deepest parts of my child's soul and I realized that in real life, unlike Disney's Cinderella who sings someday when my dreams come true that regardless of how hard we work, how good we try to be, or the sacrifices we make for others, our hopes and dreams are just that: hopes and dreams.

I learned too, that by accepting endings, life can offer beginnings and living can often not only grow easier but much more interesting. For me, Sedge's choice was a lesson: we can choose our own fate but in doing so, we prematurely cut whatever life had intended our futures to be. Ironically, my new best friend for the four years I attended high school was also named Kathleen. Kathy's last name also began with a K so I called her KK. She was an adorable, freckle-faced girl with a head of thick, auburn hair, green eyes, and a smile that made you feel good all over. Her laugh was contagious and like urinating, once one of us started to giggle, it was impossible to stop in its mid-flow, a proclivity that got us into trouble more than once in French class. Kathy and I wore identical red wool coats with fur collars and matching red berets. We took French classes together, attended basketball games where we cheered on and lusted after our favorite players who didn't know we existed, shopped at the sparkling new malls together, went to the 50-cent double feature movies on Friday nights, ice skated in the winter, and swam at the country club pool in the summer. We were happily goofy in our private world together and believed ourselves sophisticated, cultured, highly intelligent, artistic, and Francophiles, meaning we said "oui" a lot and wore berets.

Once while riding the escalators up and down in a department store, we began to speak a bastardized, nasal-induced French to one another, convinced anyone who was in earshot and saw us in our little red berets would believe we were from Paris. Nearly sixty years later in a a phone conversation, Kathy and I laughed as hard as when we were kids in recalling that escalator ride, our laughter keeping us from speaking for a good five minutes. We were rendered in stitches again while recollecting a shopping trip we had taken the autumn of our sophomore year in high school. Wanting independence from our mothers' watchful eyes, we hopped a public bus to take us downtown St. Louis. While we maneuvered down the narrow aisle of the bus, looking for an empty seat with enough room for the two of us, an already seated man stared at us as we passed by with a kind of rheumy, catatonic gaze. Kathy and I could not help but to stare back and when we did, the man slowly opened his topcoat whereupon we espied his large, meaty penis that like the man's gaze also seemed to be rheumy and staring at us in a half-erect posture. At fifteen, neither Kathy nor I had had any experience with the adult male anatomy and upon seeing such an unusual looking creature emerging from the man's pants, instead of shock or fear, we simultaneously let out a peal of laughter so boisterous the pathetic man quickly closed his coat and stumbled off the bus. For the rest of that day while we wandered through the city streets and shopped, Kathy and I would spontaneously burst into laughter.

In our sleepover that night, we did have a serious discussion of what "that thing" men possessed might mean to us should we ever be lucky enough to land a boyfriend. After all, we both were desperate to fall in love. But what love might entail beyond a romantic date and a chaste kiss now teetered precariously in our thoughts. Kathy was reared in the Catholic church and had five older sisters, one of whom was a nurse and who had a book with illustrations we explored but that did nothing to help resolve our conundrum. I had had a baby brother, but as babies in a tub, nothing looked too worrisome that I could recall. That was the extent of our experience and we agreed the "thing" was not what we had imagined. And then we agreed that in our imaginations, that thing was surely more mysterious and better than what we had seen on the bus. Besides, prior to our exposure to the reality of the thing, our visions of lust had never reached the nether regions, remaining safely above the waist. Our curiosity about it had yet to be sparked and the thing in our daydreams had been hazy, which we preferred. After some minutes mulling over the incident, exploring our feelings, and admitting our fears, we made the decision to stick to kissing until we were at least thirty and maybe at that time we would revisit the possibility of thinking again about that thing. Until then, we would hold on to our daydreams. In establishing a safety net of fifteen years or so, we forgot about the incident entirely and promptly fell asleep. But the next morning, before we could even climb out of Kathy's bunk bed or say good morning, we were screaming and laughing: "Get out of here! Heeelp! The Thing!!" Our pun was based on the 1951 horror film directed by Christian Nyby called The Thing and it was our inside joke until we both found boyfriends a couple of years later.

If we are lucky, a friendship like Kathy's comes once in a lifetime. I was lucky.