“I left Cou Falls around the time when ‘Johnny’s Lock and Gun’ in Iowa City became ‘Johnny’s Lock and Key’ – some time after Pearl Harbor – I think,” Nora said. This statement was delivered with a hesitant certainty in answer to her niece Anne’s question about when Nora first left home. Nora fanned herself with a magazine, one of several that lay on the coffee table in front of her. The late afternoon sunlight flooded half of Nora’s living room. Both sat in the shaded portion, Nora on a couch in serious need of reupholstering and Anne in a chair next to her.
For Nora, time was a continuous series of changes that she noticed in various landmarks that served as markers for when and where she was. Eventually the changes built up like fallen leaves and sorted out into eras: life on the farm, the depression, the war, the people she knew and wanted to know. Some events stood out by themselves, complete with exact dates. One such event was the day her husband died. It was on a day that felt like fall though it was still summer: It was almost seventy years ago: September 2 1955, exactly ten years after the Victory in Japan that ended the Second World War.
Nora rarely if ever talked about her husband; she didn’t talk about him with Anne that day. She never remarried, had no children and lived alone in a small house with an upstairs where her bedroom was and which few people had seen. She was ninety-five and one of two left of the eight brothers and sisters in her Irish American family; her younger sister Eleanor lived nearby.
Anne and her husband Mark were both in their seventies and despite Mark’s dislike of such events were visiting San Diego to attend a celebration of life for the husband of one of Anne’s cousins. They lived several hours north in a town that Eleanor dismissed as being on the edge of nowhere. “Nothing but trees, wind and ocean,” Eleanor had once said. Mark didn’t care for Eleanor which Anne knew, so a visit with Eleanor was clearly out. She suggested a visit with Nora instead after the memorial, but Mark had a bad headache, he said, and wanted to lie down at the hotel.
“It’s too bad Mark couldn’t come with you today to visit with me. Mark is such a dear. Gets along with the family so well. But I know what it’s like not to feel well. I was beginning to feel ill myself. It was such a hot room where they had the memorial. Poor Jan; she was so sad. Taking care of Robert for the last two years. Now she’s a widow. Like me.” Nora reached for a hard candy in a bowl on the coffee table and unwrapped it as if there were a message inside.
“Do you want something to drink, dear? I’d offer you some wine, but Eleanor had some the other day and told me it’s vinegar and not even fit to put on a salad. Or maybe water? I keep some in a jar in the refrigerator so it’s cold.”
“No thanks, Aunt Nora.”
“Speaking of throwing out the wine, Eleanor says there’s still a lot of stuff to be thrown out even after all of you were here helping last time. She wants to get the house put up for sale. Soon. Before she hauls me off to the nursing home.”
She popped the candy in her mouth. “Anyway, we’ll leave that topic for another time. Where did we leave off?”
“You were leaving Iowa.”
“Yes. Iowa.” Nora sucked on the candy and said nothing for a moment.
“Aunt Nora?”
“Oh; I’m sorry. I was getting the candy just right. I have to get it a certain way in my mouth or it just doesn’t taste right. Well, OK. I left Iowa. It would have had to be 1942. I worked in the library in Iowa City a few days a week for a year or so before I left. Your mom had already left home a few years before; I don’t remember the year. She was working in Wisconsin and then moved to Chicago when she found out about some jobs at the NPO – the Navy Purchasing Office. She wrote to me about them. There were a lot of jobs in the government then. They paid a lot more than jobs you could get in Iowa at the time. And I didn’t like the farm all that much. So I left for Chicago.”
“Grandma and grandpa must have been sad to see you go.”
“I don’t remember, actually.”
She had stood on the platform with two large suitcases and said goodbye to Eleanor who was ten and wanted to come with her, and then Bill, a few years younger than Nora; he would join the Navy a few months later. The other boys had already left home to serve, and others to work somewhere not in Iowa.
Nora waved at everyone from the train, and they waved back. When all were out of sight she thought about the people she was leaving behind. One of those was a man she had never talked to but wanted to. He was not someone she would have noticed or thought about in ordinary times, but this was war time and fewer men were around to notice or think about.
The man she didn’t know was about her age and sometimes came into the library a few blocks away from Johnny’s Lock and Gun – now Key. He worked at the hardware store across from the locksmith shop. A handsome man. He always wore a jacket and tie. His hair was impeccably combed, and he would smile at her when he saw her.
They never once spoke. Her conversations with him were imagined. In several he would tell her she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
“You must not have seen a lot of girls then.”
The two of them would laugh and he would tell funny stories that would make her laugh out loud, sometimes in public. She once told her sister Miriam, Anne’s mother, that she thought he probably had a good sense of humor. Miriam was the oldest in the family and ten years older than Nora.
“Good Lord, how on earth would you know he has a good sense of humor if you’ve never talked to him?”
“It seems like he might.”
“Well, when you do talk with him for real, let me know.”
No need to mention any of this to Anne, she thought, watching Anne writing in her notebook.
“I want to ask you something, Anne, and I want you to be honest with me.” Nora said. Anne looked up.
“I noticed you were talking with Mary and Ellen at the memorial. Did they say something bad about me?” Nora folded her arms and sat up straight. “I know I wasn’t nice to them when they were here. Those two would come by a few days a week to help when I came back from the hospital. I know I wasn’t the nicest person to be around then, what with my lung problems and such. So I probably said some things to them that I can’t really remember but I’m pretty sure they weren’t nice.”
“They didn’t say that much. Just that you were angry.”
“Well, I’m sure they said more than that.”
“I think they know it’s been hard for you.”
“I doubt it.”
“I don’t want to get in the middle of this and my cousins. Think of me as Sweden; strictly neutral.”
“If you lived here you would eventually take sides.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You would. Even if you didn’t want to.”
“Let’s talk about Chicago,” Anne said.
“What about it?”
“Did you live with my mother when you moved there?”
“Yes, we shared a room in a small apartment. We got along pretty well, though I think she was a bit jealous of me because I got a lot of attention at work. I was voted Sweetheart of the NPO in 1942.”
“What did you do to get named Sweetheart of the NPO?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s because I was the only redhead there.”
“I’ve always wondered about your red hair. You’re the only redhead in the family. Where did you get it?”
“I must have been the postman’s baby,” she said. They both laughed and when they stopped Nora said “I was beautiful, though.”
Over the next hour they talked about who came over from Ireland in the mid 1800’s, who settled in San Diego and who in Iowa, and how eventually most everyone ended up in San Diego. “Except your mother; she ended up in San Francisco. But you know all that.”
Nora rubbed her temples and leaned her head back. Anne could see that Nora was getting tired. “I lose track sometimes,” she said. “Your mother knew the most about who came over when.”
“When did you come to San Diego?”
“It was a bit after the war ended; sometime in 1946. Around the time when I stopped buying bags of coffee and bought it in cans. I transferred to the Navy Public Works Center in San Diego. I took the train.” She leaned her head back again. “It took three days.”
“Isn’t that where you met your husband?” Anne asked.
No answer.
“I heard that’s where you met.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Aunt Eleanor.”
Nora said nothing.
“You aren’t going to tell me, are you?
“No, dear.”
“Maybe we should call it quits for now,” Anne said. “Maybe you want to rest.”
“I’ll be alright,” she said. “I just want to sit for a bit. There’s a breeze starting to come up through the front door. It’s hitting my head just right and I’m enjoying it.”
It was in the late fall that Nora took the train from Chicago. She sat most of the time in the observation car, looking out the window at a never-ending landscape of cornfields and farmlands. When the train stopped in Iowa City, she saw a tall man boarding the train and thought “Well there’s a tall glass of lemonade.” Later she saw him in the observation car and waved to him.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I saw you get on the train in Iowa City. I’m from that area. So maybe we know the same people. Or each other, for that matter.”
“You lived in Iowa City?”
“No. Cou Falls. My parents had a farm.”
“Don’t know anyone from there,” he said. “My name is John by the way.”
“Nora,” she said.
“Nice name. I knew someone named Nora in high school.”
“I don’t think it was me,” she said.
“No, I don’t think it was you either.”
In fact there were very few people that they both knew from Iowa City, which surprised her. But then again, Iowa City was fairly large, she thought. “Did you ever go into the hardware store? The one across from the locksmiths?
“The one by Johnny’s Lock and Gun?”
“Johnny’s Lock and Key I think it’s called now,” she said.
“Lock and Key. Yes. I think I know the hardware store you’re talking about. I worked in an accounting office near there.”
“Did you know a man who worked in the hardware store who was kind of short with neatly combed hair and always wore a jacket and tie?”
He looked thoughtful. “Well, that could be a lot of people. I don’t remember anyone who worked in the hardware store. What about him?”
“You look like him.”
“Do I act like him?”
“I don’t know. We never got around to talking.” She laughed at what she just said, and he joined her. She added “The only conversations I had with him were imaginary.” Now he was silent; that worried her.
“I’m not crazy in case you were wondering,” she said.
“I wasn’t. I’ve had my share of imaginary conversations.”
“Where you laugh out loud?”
“Sometimes. And sometimes I get angry. I hit the wall with my fist once.”
She wanted to ask what made him so angry but decided that if he wanted to talk about it, he would. When the conversation started up again, it turned to the war which was a common topic. He had fought in the war, he told her. He and his brother had enlisted in the Navy together. His brother died.
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
“I sometimes have conversations with him. And others I know who died.”
“What about?”
“Various things.” He looked out the window at the harvested farmland now golden in the setting sun. “Mostly, I tell them I’m sorry.”
Now she wanted to ask what he was sorry about but there was no need to say anything more. The war was a marker. Before the war and after; two different times. She was convinced it would merge into one with time; a dot on a line and everyone would move on.
They talked about what they were going to do in San Diego. She told him about the transfer and her work for the Navy, and her relatives who lived in San Diego. They had dinner together, and he told her he was going to work as an accountant at a company there. Somebody he knew from the war had put in a good word for him. He talked about his plans to start his own company and maybe buy real estate.
“Thinking about getting married?”
“Maybe. If I find the right girl.”
“I don’t think you’ll have any problems.”
She didn’t know exactly when she fell in love with John; it might have been on the train. They married about a year later. He fell into a depression that grew worse over the years though neither knew that’s what it was. He became quiet and often ill-tempered. The two of them lived separate lives in the same house. He didn’t want children, he said, and many times he told her he wanted to be left alone. In the last year of his life, he saw a doctor about his insomnia. The doctor prescribed phenobarbital, a common sedative at the time given to relieve anxiety.
The night he died, John and Nora had had an argument. There were many over the last two years, full of accusations and regrets, mostly from her. This time was particularly intense. He was boring, she said; they rarely talked, he used to be funny. Compared with others their age, they weren’t keeping up. He was doing the same old thing; he would never have a company of his own. She questioned what she ever saw in him and why she ever wanted to marry him.
“What do you want from me?” he said.
“I want you to fit in. You think you’re better and know more than everyone, that you can do their jobs better than they can. If you wanted to, that is. But you never want to. You act like you hate my family. You don’t even try to fit in.”
“No one fits into your family except your family,” he said, his back to her.
“Well you certainly talk with Bill a lot. What on earth do you two talk about anyway? Let me guess. The war? No one cares anymore. It’s over.”
He said nothing for a moment then turned around, his eyes level with hers. “Yes, it’s over,” he said. “In fact, it’s exactly ten years since it ended; September 2, 1945.”
They said no more after that; he went off to the bedroom, and she sat in the couch. She remembered past conversations, people she knew who were happy and those who were sad.
He died in his sleep that night and the next morning Nora wept. There was no definitive diagnosis; the examining doctor thought it was a heart attack, though John had no history of heart problems. He had been told not to drink while taking phenobarbital; people ignore such warnings all the time, Nora told herself, recalling that he drank every night. Though the possibility of suicide crossed her mind, and perhaps others in the family, the cause of death never went beyond heart attack when she talked with the monsignor of her church.
“The breeze feels nice. I think it’s finally cooling down,” Nora said. She watched Anne as she looked through the notes she had written. Family histories are such complicated affairs, she thought.
“It’s getting late, Aunt Nora. Mark will be wondering what I’m doing.”
“Oh, give Mark my best. I’m sorry he wasn’t feeling well. Do you want some tangerines to take back with you? I picked some this morning from my tree. Let me give you some.”
At the front door Nora handed Anne a bag of tangerines. “I don’t know when you’ll be here again. This may be the last time we see each other.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Aunt Nora. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”
They hugged each other and Nora started to cry.
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m a terrible person.”
“Why would you say a thing like that?
“I have my reasons,” she said, wiping her eyes with her hands.
“You aren’t going to tell me, are you, Aunt Nora?”
“No dear.”
“Oh, Nora.”
Anne said her name once more and they hugged and said goodbye again. Nora waved and watched the car drive down the street until it was out of sight. She went back inside and sat on the couch and unwrapped another hard candy. She thought about the train ride where she met her husband. A series of memories then followed, but without any imaginary conversations; a silent movie – moving from one life to another.
About the author
Barry Garelick has fiction published in Heimat, CafeLit, Opiate, and Fiction on the Web. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife.
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