Rhonda the Rubber Woman Read online

  Rhonda

  The Rubber Woman

  Norma Peterson

  New York

  PROLOGUE

  Until lately a problem with my mom, besides being the town hussy, was the way she thought about life. The way she used to see it, life was like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and you had your place in the puzzle, and that was the end of it. There were the hotshots whose pieces were a part of the real picture, like the blue lake or the gleaming castle in the center. Then there were the others whose pieces made up the clouds in the distance or the trunk of a tree alongside the castle. The way my mom saw it, if that was your place, no matter how hard you tried to fit into the lake or the castle, tough luck. The only place you’d ever fit would be the tree trunk or the cloud.

  Me, I like to think life is more like a poem. You can keep working at it and make it better. I want to go places and do things. Right now Bobby Felker wants me to run off with him, and I want to, but if I go it’ll mean a life of crime, and I’ll have my mom to thank for that, too.

  I’m heading back to Philadelphia to write everything down and try to make sense of it, waking up a hundred times a night, thinking of the afternoon with Bobby when Artie Shaw played “Begin the Beguine,” trying to feel like a normal human being. I don’t know. Life is getting spooky. Sometimes I think I should go back to being Rhonda the Rubber Woman.

  Nancy Sayers, age 17, 1947

  Georgia’s Girl

  Part One

  1

  GEORGIA SAYERS, 1930

  I lived for when Carl came to Marysville. The home office sent him around every three weeks and we’d go off in his Packard, Carl driving like a house afire, and park on Wind Gap Junction Road and do it. Afterwards he’d laugh and call me his little sex fiend and I’d laugh, too.

  I was surprised doing it was so noisy. Carl moaned and groaned so much at first I was embarrassed, but later I started to moan and groan back a little to be polite. It was like in church when some folks sing the hymns real loud and you don’t know the tune, but you try to put in your two cents’ worth anyway.

  Afterwards we’d smoke cigarettes and look out at the cornfields in the moonlight and listen to the katydids. Carl usually talked about goings-on at the stocking factory but I only listened out of the corner of one ear, feeling sticky and uncomfortable, wishing I could change my underwear.

  I liked doing it with Carl, though. I thought about it even when we weren’t together. Sometimes feelings welled up in my throat as though they were too much for a little five-foot two-inch person to bear. I pictured us married like my sister Cora and her husband Walt, nestled together in a cute apartment over in Clinton. I was so happy, I called Carl my honey and I wanted to tell the world about us but he said I shouldn’t. He said the company frowned on employees getting sweet with one another.

  I thought of saying Marian Uhler from finishing went out with Clarence Bobst over in supplies, and nobody seemed to mind, but I didn’t. I figured Carl’s job was probably more important, being sent around to fix machines at plants like ours all over Pennsylvania. Plus I was lucky to have a job at all. They only hired so many girls.

  We had this system. When he wanted to see me, he’d come into the lunch room at noon whistling “Anything Goes.” That’s what was playing the day we met; I still remember.

  Carl is at the counter eating a ham sandwich and I’m sitting at a formica table drinking a cup of coffee with cream. Carl looks down at me. “I’m Carl Markell. Don’t you work at the stocking factory?”

  I jerk as if somebody’d poked me. “Yeah, over in seams,” I whisper.

  Carl picks up his plate and brings it over and sits down with me. He’s handsome, with dark eyes, brown hair, and eyebrows big as brushes.

  “So you have an advantage over me.” He squints and lights a cigarette. “You know my name but I don’t know yours.”

  I laugh. “Georgia Sayers.”

  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” Ethel Merman sings from the jukebox.

  “So, Georgia,” Carl leans toward me, “how about we go out for a ride tonight? Maybe stop at a speakeasy.”

  A speakeasy! I shiver just thinking about it. “Oh, I’d love to,” I whisper.

  “… heaven knows, anything goes,” Ethel sings.

  “Good.” Carl glances at his watch. “Well, back to the salt mines.” He gets up.

  “Yeah.” I stub out my Raleigh. “No rest for the idle, huh?” I give him a sunny smile and walk back to work with a belly warm as pancakes.

  Carl had said to meet him at Marysville Park so that night and then all the other nights I told Mama I was going to meet some girls from work, but instead I’d walk over to the football stadium behind the park where Carl would pick me up. Mama would just nod and smile as she folded clothes or darned socks, waiting for Fibber McGee and Molly or Easy Aces, her gray hair pulled back in a bun that hung loose on her neck like a bird’s nest. Mama was getting old so she didn’t ask questions like she used to. I was glad. I don’t know why but Mama always worried about me. Cora used to tease me saying it was because I was so slaphappy. Cora was only nineteen, a year younger than me, but smarter.

  Anyway, I kept things to myself like Carl said to until they started going bad, and then I had to tell someone about it so I told Cora, then I told the reverend, and eventually the whole town found out.

  What happened was that the chickens came home to roost, and I got caught. Pregnant. One night in September I tried to tell Carl I’d missed a period. I was scared and not so sure we should keep on doing it, but he wouldn’t listen. He never liked me talking beforehand. If I ever tried to say anything beforehand, he’d put his fingers over my mouth and say “Sh sh sh sh. It’s better if you don’t talk.”

  So I told him afterwards.

  He looked peeved. He lit a Camel and stared out the car window for a long time. It was drizzling; everything seemed to smell damp and dreary, and you could hear the rustling of wet leaves.

  Finally he said, “It’s probably just your nerves.” He flicked his cigarette out the window and looked at me, his mouth curving way down on one side.

  “Do you think so?” I wondered. I always did have bad nerves. Bugs. Thunder. Just someone walking up from behind could scare the daylights out of me. Cora called me Jittery Georgia.

  “Try to relax,” Carl said. He ran his fingers down my cheeks and across my neck and squeezing my shoulders. “That’s all you need to do, relax.”

  But I couldn’t relax. I missed another period and I started feeling queasy. I had to tell everybody I had the stomach flu. Then one night when we were parked on Wind Gap Junction Road, Carl told me the bosses in Paoli reassigned him to work in another region and he’d be moving away from where he lived out in the R.D. He wouldn’t be coming to Marysville anymore.

  “I’ll miss you, Georgia.” He took off his fedora and ran his fingers around the brim of it instead of looking at me. “You’re really sweet. But I bet some nice guy will come along before you know it, some nice guy who’ll take care of you.”

  I twisted a button on my sweater, so scared my heart started beating a mile a minute. I wondered if this is what happens when a body is heartbroken. Your heart starts beating so fast it goes all helter skelter and so do you.

  Carl reached into my purse, pulled out a Raleigh and lit it for me. When I took it, our hands touched, and I shivered. He lit another Camel for himself and rolled down the window of the Packard. The night air, with its scent of sweet corn and fertilizer, slapped against my face.

  I started to cry.

  “Come on, Georgia, you’re a big girl,” Carl said. He leaned over and kissed my throat.

  I wasn’t even worrying anymore about gett
ing pregnant. “I’ll miss you so much,” I whispered.

  “Oh, Georgia, I’ll miss you, too,” he said.

  My Raleigh was wet from tears and my nose started running. Carl gave me a hanky, and put his fingers over my eyes and mouth, saying, “Sh sh sh sh,” to stop the crying. Then before you know it, he whispered, “How about one more time, Georgia? One for the road.”

  “You got knocked up?” Cora’s mouth fell open when I told her. We were in Mama’s kitchen having coffee. Cora came to visit once a week from over in Clinton. She and Walt had moved there after they got married. “A big city is more debonair,” Cora had said. Now she was sitting on a wooden chair tightening her garters, her silky blond hair hanging over her face on one side. But when I told her what had happened she jerked her head up fast and stared at me, her eyebrows arching like two pyramids.

  “Jesus, Georgia,” she said. “Sometimes I think when they gave out brains, you were in Toledo.”

  “Don’t say that, Cora.” My chin began to tremble.

  She clutched her garters, her legs milky white above her rolled stockings. “Didn’t you make the jerk use anything? Don’t you know about rubbers? These days everyone uses them.”

  I had heard about rubbers but I blushed at Cora saying the word out loud, and I wouldn’t in a million years have been able to say it to Carl. I figured he knew what he was doing. Anyway I was always too busy thinking how romantic it was, Carl on my mind all the time, then the two of us being so warm and close when he came to Marysville—as warm and close as two people ever can be. Plus there’d been something else. A part of me had wanted to show Cora I could get a little something out of life, too. Cora always had all the luck. I wanted some of it, too.

  By now I wasn’t feeling very lucky, though. I was feeling miserable and sinful. I started to cry and reached in my blouse pocket for a hanky.

  Cora got up and walked over to where I was sitting on the other side of the table, alongside the coal stove. “What are you going to do?” she asked, perching on the edge of the table and putting her arm around me. Her left hand hung down over my shoulder. The tiny diamond on her engagement ring snuggled next to the wedding band sparkled like a sunburst through my tears.

  I wanted to push her hand away, but I turned my head instead. “I don’t know,” I sobbed. “My friend from work, Mildred, found out he’s married,” I sputtered through the hanky. “He has three children. Boys. They live out in the R.D. But they’re gonna move.”

  “Jesus,” Cora whispered. “What a bastard!” Then after a minute she said, “There are places you can go to have it. Homes for wayward girls. I heard about one up in Boston.”

  “Boston?” She might as well have said the moon. I hadn’t ever even been to Philadelphia or even Hershey, someplace I’d always wanted to go because I loved their chocolate—places right here in Pennsylvania. How would I ever get to Boston?

  I cried harder and she patted my shoulder. “Well, there are probably places closer by,” she said. She started naming towns that might have homes for wayward girls, but then decided they were probably expensive, wherever they were, and I only made $15.00 a week at the factory and I gave $7.50 of it to Mama for room and board.

  Cora pulled a chair up and we sat quietly. She hugged me again. I felt sick to my stomach and wished I had a saltine. Looking down at my lap, I twisted my hanky into a tight knot.

  After a while Cora lit a cigarette and said, “Do you want me to tell Mama for you?”

  I looked at her through the cloud of smoke, afraid she wouldn’t tell it right.

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  But I put it off and the next thing I knew, Mama got a bad cough that came from way down inside her and cracked like sheets snapping in the wind. The doctor said pneumonia, gave her pills and put her to bed for a month. I decided to go see Reverend Mackey, who I knew liked Cora and me. He’d tell us we had the nicest peaches and cream complexion of any girls in the congregation, and sometimes he’d give us an extra pat or a hug.

  I hadn’t ever been in the rectory before. When I knocked on the heavy wood door, Reverend Mackey opened it right away, his head big and round as a red cabbage. He gave me a smile and said, “Here, Georgia, have a seat,” putting his stocky hand on a chair in front of a huge desk.

  I sat down, my heart thumping to beat the band. The desk lamp had a papery orange shade that made the light dim but I could see the reverend had on a dark jacket and a sweater vest underneath. When he bent down to pull another chair up closer to mine, I noticed that his thin black hair was combed straight back so neatly the teeth marks of the comb still showed.

  “Well, Georgia,” he said, putting his hands palm down on his legs, “you say you have a problem.”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Well, now, you don’t need to be embarrassed here.” The reverend smiled wider. “This is the house of the Lord.” He put one of his hands on mine, which were clenched in my lap. I noticed there was a copy of the church bulletin on his desk with a note clipped to it that said “Castor Oil for Corns.” The reverend was an expert on home remedies for everything from pinkeye to phlegm in the throat. He liked to print little tips for the ladies in the church bulletin.

  “Just tell me what’s bothering you as though you were praying to the Lord, Georgia,” he said.

  “Well…” I began, so scared, my heart pounding, “I … uh … have been seeing a man.”

  “Yes, yes,” Reverend Mackey put his other hand on top of my fist. I felt like my nerves were going to jump out of my skin. A clock ticked from somewhere in the dark behind his desk.

  “And I got … pregnant,” I blurted out. There. I’d said it, half expecting a bolt of lightening to hit me, but there was just the ticking of the clock.

  “Pregnant!” The reverend’s voice sounded like a gun crack. For a minute I felt peeved at him saying it out so loudly. His smile faded, his hands lifted, and he stiffened as he got up and looked out the paneled window at the night. “It’s the times. The music. The drink. Women going to work.” He turned back toward me. “That’s where you met him, isn’t it? At work.”

  I could feel the blood banging in my fingertips. I fidgeted in my chair, wishing he would just give me some prayers to say and get it over with.

  “Who is the man, Georgia?” the reverend said in a kind voice, but he had a stern look on his face, like a school teacher. He walked toward me and sat down again.

  I hadn’t expected this. My knees knocked together and I thought I shouldn’t say Carl’s name, that somehow it would cause more trouble. “He’s moving somewhere else,” I muttered. “He’s not coming back to Marysville.”

  The reverend’s eyes softened. “Georgia,” he said, “the Lord must know the man’s name. You can’t tease the Lord telling Him just a little.” He leaned closer.

  I was afraid to say but more afraid not to, so I told him Carl’s name. Then he asked me how many times we’d done it and where. His eyes got shiny as I mumbled, looking up at him in shaky jerks.

  My voice was small and breathless, but I kept going, scared of what would happen if I didn’t. “My … uh … girlfriend from work, Mildred … she found out he’s married. He has … uh … three children. Boys,” I stuttered.

  The reverend jumped up. “Lord, help us. A wife and three innocent children.”

  The reverend looked sad for a minute, then sat down again and put his hand over my trembling fingers. “Now now, Georgia,” he said. “The Lord understands.” He took off his glasses. The skin around his eyes looked like raw meat.

  “Pray for forgiveness. Ask the Lord for help in turning away from the Devil’s wicked ways.”

  “Oh, I will,” I whispered.

  “The child will be your penance. The price of your sin.”

  I dipped my head and looked ashamed.

  Reverend Mackey shifted in his creaky chair. “Would you like me to tell your Mama?”

  I nodded.

  “Poor Catherine.” That made me feel the worst of a
ll. “Is she still feeling poorly?”

  “Oh, no.” I crossed my fingers behind my back. “They gave her different kinds of medicine. She’s better now.”

  “Good.” The rReverend patted my arm. “Well, what’s done is done, isn’t it?” he said. “I will tell Catherine that sometimes sin just gets ahold of a person. I will tell her to be forgiving.”

  “Thank you, Reverend Mackey,” I said, grateful he was finished.

  As he opened the rectory door, he leaned close. “Come and talk to me again any time, Georgia. I understand that the flesh is weak.”

  “Oh, I will. Thank you.”

  Then he gave me a hug and I noticed his glasses were thick and dirty; his head just seemed to grow out of his shoulders. In fact, there was hardly any neck at all.

  The next church bulletin had a tip for morning sickness. “Keep a tin of soda crackers by your bed and eat two first thing when you wake up, before you even lift your head,” it said. “Don’t worry about crumbs on the sheet.”

  But Mama didn’t say a word. She was up and around again except she moved slow and still coughed like her insides were rattling around in a bag.

  Then one Tuesday morning just after I’d put the sign in the window for fifty pounds of ice, she sat down at the kitchen table and said, “Well, Reverend Mackey came to see me. He said you’d gone and got yourself pregnant.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered, standing by the window. I could feel the wind from outside through the glass.

  She had a stern look. “He said it was our cross to bear, but I don’t like that kind of talk. So I’ve thought about it, and I don’t see why I can’t raise another baby. I raised two. I had to bury one. Poor Carol.” Mama looked down, blinked and got up for a cup of tea. Her housedress hung on her like a sack. She sat down again and I worked up the nerve to walk to the table and sit across from her.

  She looked at me. “Maybe the Lord is giving me another chance.” Her voice sounded strong but her eyes looked pale as rinse water.