All The Good Parents Were Taken

“How old is she?” I asked.

“17 months. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yeah. And she’s so good too.”

“She’s pretty happy just being her,” she said, looking straight ahead, walking slowly, a slow smile pulling up the corners of her mouth. Her hair was a mass of dark brown, almost black, curls, twisted up in a loose knot at the back of her head. Tendrils fell freely and bounced around her face in soft coils. She was one of the youngest of all the teachers and counselors at that school, just a few years younger than my mom. Her skin was deeply tanned and she had small, almost unnoticeable lines around her eyes and mouth that bunched together when she smiled and rested waiting when she didn’t. Somehow her soft beauty offended me, the easy way she carried herself. As if this was any regular day.

“Here’s our house.” She turned up the driveway of a small, ranch-style home.

“I can’t believe I’ve never seen you before in the neighborhood,” I said.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said and smiled at me. My cheeks grew hot and I stared at the cement. I knew that people in the neighborhood talked about my parents and how they fight. One time my mom threw all my dad’s clothes and shoes and even a large amount of cash out on the front lawn in the middle of a rage. It was after they had a fight and he had already left the house when she started gathering armfuls of his things to take outside and scatter across the lawn and sidewalk, kicking some of it wildly out over the curb and into the street, screaming all the while. People came out of their houses to stare. Then my mom came out with a shoebox filled with cash and emptied it out onto the sidewalk. After she walked back inside to get more, people started closing in and picking up bills. That was when I picked up the phone and called the police. It hadn’t been the first time: 3309 Avers was an address the police knew well.

“Have a seat right there, girls. I’m just going to put Sarah down for a nap. Be right back.” We sat down on a couch in the front room. Sophie was still clinging to me but she had her head up and was looking around. The place was filled with pictures of Mrs. Dalby with other dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful people in some exotic land. There were lots of candles in large, ornate holders garnished with colorful potpourri. There were several bookshelves lined neatly with hardcover books. I had never seen so many books and each of them intrigued me. It was an altogether new feeling, like a tickle in my chest. My heart, I imagined, sprouted a feather and it fluttered against inner chambers I’d never see. Names like Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Freud; some I had heard before and some I only sensed the greatness of. Chaucer, Cervantes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Neruda, all in various scripts, sizes, and colors, their spines beaming with rigid importance.

“Can I get you girls anything to eat or drink?” she asked, emerging from a doorway across the room.

“No, thank you, we’re fine,” I said, still scanning the books.

“You like fiction?” she asked and sat down next to me. She had taken the loose knot out and her hair fell freely over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back.

“I really do,” I answered, now staring at her.

“What’s your favorite?” she asked, leaning back and crossing her legs.

“Huckleberry Finn.”

“Oh, that’s a great one. One of my favorites too. I’ve read it maybe a hundred times. What else?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read much else.”

“Well, you can borrow anything you want that you see here. I have a regular library. Just make sure you take good care of them and return them when you’re done.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Anything you want.” I wiggled out of Sophie’s grasp and got up. I pulled a thick volume from the top of one of the shelves: The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

“Ah. You want poetry?”

“This first, then I’ll borrow something else?”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll even make you a reading list; how about that?”

“Yes! I mean, yeah sure.” I felt my hot face again and looked at the floor to hide it. She laughed and messed my hair.

“You can come here anytime, Jane.” She looked at Sophie and smoothed her hair back with her palm. “You too, sweetheart. What’s your name?” Sophie looked at me.

“Her name’s Sophie,” I said.

“Hi, Sophie. That’s a beautiful name.”

Sophie smiled at her and actually spoke. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“You can talk to me about what happened if you want to.” She turned to face me again.

“My mom and dad had another fight,” I blurted. She nodded her head.

“She started it because she insulted him. Said he’s never going to amount to anything but a janitor. He started beating her up like he always does and then she knocked him out. I think she threw something at his head and cut him. He pinned her down after that and was bleeding on her from his head. I walked in and he looked up. That’s when she punched him in the head where his cut was and knocked him out for good. She told us to leave and call for help.” I watched for her expression of shock and horror but it didn’t come. She kept her gaze level. Concerned, sad even, but not shocked.

“So this happens often with your mom and dad?”

“All the time. She always has some mark on her. She lies and tells us she fell or accidentally walked into a wall.”

“She doesn’t lie!” Sophie said, shooting an angry look at me. Mrs. Dalby put an arm around her. It was easier for Sophie to believe the lies. They, along with my mother’s unblinking almond eyes, held her like vice grips in place, allowing her to ignore things into nonexistence. I always knew the truth though I wished I didn’t, or at least wished for a place big enough to hold it for me. My mom and her lies swarmed inside a hollow place in my gut.

That evening just before nightfall, Sophie and I walked home slowly and in silence. When we reached the house it seemed as if nobody was home, but for the door being unlocked and the car parked out front. Inside, it was quiet and dark. I locked the front door behind us and we went straight to bed. Waiting for sleep, my head was filled with thoughts of Mrs. Dalby. Her books, her photos, the father of her baby.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked Sophie, wanting a break from my thoughts.

“Mrs. Dalby’s nice.” She said.

“Yeah.” I said.

“Where do you think her husband is?”

“Maybe she’s not married.”

“She has to be married, she has a baby.”

“Maybe she’s divorced, or never got married to begin with.”

“What’s divorced?

I thought carefully about how to answer. When Sophie asked me a question about what something meant or what it was, I felt obliged to tell her the truth as accurately as possible. I wanted my answers to be factual, so if she looked it up later in an encyclopedia, the information would check out.

“Divorced is when a married couple breaks up in court. They legally undo their marriage,” I said. Satisfied with my answer, I smiled into the dark.

“Oh,” she answered back. After a long silence, she asked, “why do people do that?”

“Lots of reasons, I’m sure. They fight too much, they stop loving each other. Mom and dad will get divorced one day.”

“No they won’t. Don’t say that,” she said in a high voice, sounding near tears.

“I’m sorry, Sophie; I was just kidding. I’m sorry I said it. Everything will be alright, I promise,” I said in the most reassuring tone I could muster. She did not reply again. I lay listening to the soft night noises. My mom told us it was the house shifting and settling. I fell asleep praying that what I told Sophie would be true.



The next day, Sophie and I woke to the absence of my mother. This day there would be no facing her beat-up face and accompanying story. Only my dad with red, raised scratch marks across his neck and cheek and a few stitches over his right eye.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked.

“Jail.” He was sitting in his chair eating a bowl of cereal.

“Why?”

“You see this?” He glared at me and pointed to his stitches.

“You hadda go and call the cops, so they came. Saw what she did and cuffed ‘er. Took ‘er away.”

“Mom told me to go.”

“Yeah, I know. ‘Sokay.” His mouth was full of half-chewed cheerios. He put the bowl down and got up. He grabbed his white t-shirt from the back of the chair and pulled it over his head. Chest hairs sprang out from the collar.

Without a notion of where we were going, he took us out. We walked toward the corner of Milwaukee and Belmont Avenues, where I knew there was a pet store. Galvanized by the throng of hurried people, steel, and concrete, there is a wholesome violence about the city of Chicago on a Saturday afternoon.

The smell hit us first. Fur-covered bodies in small-barred cages soiled with urine and dog spit. Echoing all around were their varying, inflected barks―high pitched screeches, low ambiguous moans, desperate howls, curt, loud outcries.

Sophie approached the cage of a small, white, black-flecked Siberian Husky. She had unnaturally beautiful, darkly framed eyes, one unlimited blue, one bottomless brown. Under our attention she was a blaze of trembling, amplified life, flashes of pinkish skin against thick tufted fur, glints of white sharp teeth and black arced lips, lustrous flaring nostrils and blurred whipping tail. Sophie’s groping hands thrust as far as her arms could reach through the bars of the cage while the wet length of the dog’s tongue flapped against her small face. She became our dog in that moment.

“I want this one!” Sophie yelled.

“What should we name her?” I asked. Sophie just stared at me, half her little body still jammed inside the dog’s cage.

“It’s gotta have a name,” my dad said. Sophie looked at the dog thoughtfully, tilted her face, grabbed her ear.

“Missy,” she said.

“What’s Missy gonna set me back?” my dad asked the clerk, pulling a fat wad of bills from his back pocket.

“She’s $500 even,” the store clerk said. My dad flipped out five hundred dollar bills as if they were singles, and handed them to the clerk. The clerk looked at the cash and blushed.

“Oh, OK. Just follow me to the register over here.” He turned and bumped into another dog’s cage, nearly tripped over his own feet. My dad followed him to pay for Missy while another clerk took her out of the cage and fitted her with a collar and a leash so we could walk her home.

On the way, we stopped off at Jefferson Park to play with Missy. We ran and ran in circles while Missy chased us. She broke away and sprinted wide circles around us, her body low to the ground, ears plastered back, teeth and eyes glinting.

My dad told us that dogs traveled together in the wilderness in what were called packs. Missy, Sophie, and I became a pack. That first night, exhausted from playing hard with Missy for hours, we slept as one entwined pile together on Sophie’s bed. That night of sleep was peace for me for the rest of my life.

My dad had resisted our pleas to adopt a dog for years before, always saying it wasn’t fair to raise a dog in the city, confining it to a chain in the yard. One of the conditions he gave us for keeping Missy was that we take her to Wisconsin during the summer, where my grandparents went to spend the summers in a cabin by a lake.

Besides her brother Joe, my mom had an older sister, Gracie. As a child, my aunt Grace had suffered several seizures. She would alternately go blind and fall over, spontaneously losing her balance. Tests revealed a brain tumor. She opted to have surgery that would remove the mass and relieve the pressure, reducing the seizures but not stopping them. The surgery was a relative success, and Grace went on to marry Ronald and live a happy life. Her seizures continued but were less frequent. As a result, a pleasant dulling of awareness was both her burden and her blessing. She was genuinely kind and easily happy, a delightful presence.

Their father, whom Sophie and I called Papa, was a young immigrant from Greece when he married a girl of Polish, Bohemian, and German descent named Carol, known to Sophie and me as Gram. She came from an old, lawless Chicago family. Her mother, Lola, was an alcoholic and a known bootlegger after the Volstead Act (better known as the National Prohibition Act) was enacted by Congress in 1919. She was a tough, rugged woman with bullet-holes in her legs from being shot at while she ran from the authorities carrying outlawed booze to saloons and speakeasies, or so the legend goes. Lola’s husband, Gram’s father, straight-edged Gary, was a door-to-door Hoover salesman from the age of 18 until the time of his death in 1944. It was the early 1900’s when William Henry Hoover revolutionized vacuum technology by producing the first upright, bag-on-a-stick, domestic carpet sweeper. By the decade of my great-grandfather’s death, more than 70% of all vacuum cleaners were sold door-to-door. And then there was Lou, Gram’s brother, who was a rather prominent gangster, rumored to have been one of Al Capone’s minions and to have played a part in the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.

With an alcoholic mother, Gram grew up to be a woman constantly either fearing or protecting, always loving. True to its tendency, the disease skipped Gram’s generation and landed squarely on her second-born, my mother. It is for this reason, I believe, that I have always shared a special bond with Gram. Each of us had, from an early age, been heaped with the sufferings and destructions of our mothers. That first summer when we got Missy, Mom needed a break, so Gram invited us up there. We went with my aunt Grace and my uncle Joe.

Missy had land there to run and a lake to swim in. And it was quiet, so quiet compared to Chicago. The trees and water with their greens, blues, and browns created together an intensified soundlessness. Matt Donahue’s was the candy store, a log cabin at the top of a dirt road, hidden by thick woods so that it seemed like a secret that only we knew about. The old lady who worked there, Mrs. Mare, cooked homemade bread and jam and sold them to the people in town. But the reason Sophie and I nicknamed it the candy store was the penny candy she sold out of big, bottomless bins at the front of the store. Tootsie Rolls, Lemon Heads, sugar taffy, bubble gum, Alexander the Grapes, everything no more then a penny a piece. We filled our pockets for a quarter and went on our way. I’ll never forget finding the candy store for the first time.

Sophie and I set out walking with Missy through the playground into a big open field with tall grass. Missy bounded through like a rabbit; she was so happy in that field we decided to walk all the way across. When we reached the far side and were about to start back, I noticed a small dirt road that emerged from the bordering woods and snake uphill. Without speaking, I started toward it and Sophie followed.