The Tin Box Secret - Chapter 1 (Re-posted again for your convenience.)

Chapter 1                          The Tin Box Secret

 

                                1968

 The March winds blew and searched for a way to invade the room. I huddled under the covers as the windows shuttered beneath the continuous assault from outside. Within the house, I could hear muffled sounds as my mother prepared my father’s lunch in the kitchen.  The clank of his metal lunchbox resounded on the counter, blending with the music that drifted upstairs from the kitchen radio.  My father turned off the bathroom faucet and the steps creaked beneath him on his way down to the kitchen.  My parents hushed voices floated through the hallway and penetrated my bedroom door.  The warm tones of my father’s voice mixed with the lighter, higher pitch of my mother’s.  I have heard it said that my father had the voice of a “crooner;” and it is true that when he sang, his voice could be warm and comforting.  But when he was angry, that same voice could paralyze us with fear.

 

My parents were discussing the arrival of our new television set.  The excitement in our house had been building over the past few days since my father had gone to the local appliance store and purchased our family’s first color TV.  The first time I had ever seen one, was at Marcie’s house.  Marcie’s parents owned a profitable dairy business, so they were able to afford all of the latest gadgets. They even had a side-by-side refrigerator with a built-in ice-maker!  Although Marcie and her family had moved to California two years ago, her color TV would forever remain an object of wonder in my mind.  While the picture itself was full of color, it was the edges of the screen that captivated me.  There seemed to be a rainbow of colors compressed into a halo, framing the moving images within.  I was so fascinated by those colors that I had to quell my urge to touch the screen to see if I could feel the rainbow with my fingertips.  

 

          “Girls,” my mother’s voice called from the kitchen, “it’s time for breakfast.”

 

I pulled myself out of bed and looked over at Angie’s side of the room.  It was as if an imaginary line had been drawn down the middle of the floor.  Her side was perfect, everything in its place.  My side looked like a small explosion had thrown clothes, paper, pencils, crayons, and stuffed animals in every direction.  I stepped away from the bed and pushed everything aside, making a path among the chaos.   I opened my dresser drawers and tried to find something to wear among the disheveled clothing while Angie jumped out of bed, grabbed her neatly folded clothes, and ran into the bathroom.  I was still trying to get my things together ten minutes later when Angie reappeared at the bedroom door and said, “Juliana, you’d better hurry or you’re gonna be late again.”  Angie’s smile revealed that her motive wasn’t completely sympathetic.  At the ripe old age of nine, she learned always to be the “good” child.  She skipped downstairs to the breakfast table and I rushed toward the bathroom, nearly colliding with my older sister, Mary, as she came down the stairs from her attic bedroom.

 

“Queen Mary,” as I called her, had her own room because she was two years older than me.  Just two years, think about it!  If I had been born first, she would be sharing the room with Angie!  Mary was a junior in high school and one of the smartest people I knew.  I peeked out of the door and saw her pause for a moment in front of Joe’s empty room before continuing down to the kitchen.  I swallowed to keep the tears from seeping past my eyelids and walked into the bathroom.  Fifteen minutes later, I joined my sisters at the breakfast table.

 

          My father was just reaching for his coat and lunchbox as I sat down to breakfast.  He kissed each of us goodbye, his clean shaven face soft and smelling like Old Spice.  When he came home from work he would kiss each of us again, but his five o’clock shadow would then scrape against our cheeks like sandpaper against silk.   Now, as he walked down the stairs toward the garage he called back up to us, “See you later alligator!”  My sisters and I replied with a giggle, “In a while crocodile.”  This was our routine every morning. 

 

         The breakfast table had been set with three bowls, a gallon of milk, a small bowl of sugar, one box of Rice Krispies and one box of Cornflakes.  I poured the Rice Krispies into my bowl and sprinkled some sugar over it.  Next I poured the milk over the cereal and bent low to listen for the “snap, crackle, pop!” that the commercials promised.  On the radio a woman was singing, “Winston tastes good like a – bump, bump – cigarette should.”   My mother danced around the kitchen and tried her best to sing along.  She wasn’t very good at it, but I still liked to hear her sing.  I sat back in my chair and smiled, it was so nice to see her happy.  For a brief moment my family seemed almost . . . normal.  Above the radio on the wall was a sign that read, “Don’t cry over spilt milk.”  I don’t know why it was in our house, because if you had spilt the milk, you were bound to be crying.  My father didn't like messes.   By its side was another sign, “A man’s home is his castle,” a reminder to keep the peace.  My muscles automatically tensed and I scooped up a spoonful of cereal and gulped it down.

 

          The news announcer came on next and everyone stopped eating for a minute.  “Tuesday, March 19, 1968.  In the news today, Robert F. Kennedy, who announced this past weekend that he intends to join the race for President of the United States, made it clear that he has concerns about President Johnson’s decision to send 35,000 to 50,000 more troops to Vietnam . . .”

 

We waited to hear the latest tally of dead in the war.  It always seemed to indicate huge losses for the North Vietnamese while the U.S. casualties remained minimal.   It made me think about old western movies.  Once I had been upset when the Indians in an old movie were slaughtered by the cowboys.  My father told me that the actors who played the Indians would just keep getting up, run behind the cameras, and when they came back in front of the cameras, they would fall again.  It was just a trick.  Things weren't always how they seemed.  I kind of felt like the Vietnam War was like that.  According to the news reports, the North Vietnamese seemed to be losing and the United States soldiers were winning.  But I didn't quite believe them.

 

Even though Vietnam was so far away, it was real to me.  My brother, Joe, was in the army and he had been in Vietnam for over a year already.  That’s why it got so quiet at the kitchen table.  I wondered now why President Johnson wanted to send over more soldiers if it was true that we were winning the war.  I was glad when the news ended and The Fifth Dimension started singing their new hit.

 

For a moment, I stared at my cereal.  The milk slowly dissolved the Rice Krispies until they became soft and bloated.  I touched my head as the pain returned once again.  “Another headache, honey?” my mother asked.  Thinking back to the night before, images from the dream came and went.  An overwhelming feeling of loss crept up into my throat and almost suffocated me.  The headaches had a habit of following those dreams.  Dreams that seemed more like warnings, or perhaps memories, than actual dreams.  My mother handed me some Aspergum and I popped the chewy medicine in my mouth as I cleared my cereal from the table, no longer feeling hungry.

 

We put on our coats and hats.  My mother always insisted that we wear our hats, but I knew that as soon as Mary was out of sight, she would take hers off.   Mary thought she was too cool to wear a hat.  She turned right to walk north toward the high school bus stop and Angie and I turned left.  Once we were around the corner, Angie and I also separated, she walked east toward the elementary school and I continued south toward the junior high.  As I approached the school, I looked out over the bay and watched the seagulls.  The school sat on filled-in swampland.  The bay stretched out south and as far west and east as I could see.  I glanced nervously in all three directions and scanned the skies.  Then I surveyed the new park that was in the process of being constructed across the street from the school.  The park was still a long way from being finished.  Tractors had moved around piles of sand and dirt, and the once beautiful marshlands, now had a scarred look about them.   When I was younger, I had liked to walk along the shore of the bay, behind the sand dunes, hidden from the world.  Occasionally, when the tractors were silent, I still found peace there.  I had a place along the beach.  It was my secret place, where I would sit and just think about things.  I worried about how long it would be kept secret once the park was finished.  But then again, I worried about a lot of things.

 

Harbor Junior High had a bomb shelter built into the basement.  Once a year, the teachers would take us down into the shelter, to see where we would hide if the Russians launched missiles against New York.  Of course, they didn't actually say that, but we all knew what they were thinking.  Sweet lemon drop candies were stored there in case we had to survive for some time without food.  However, we were given lemon drops whenever they brought us down.  I know this was supposed to make the shelter seem less scary, but this made me worry that there wouldn't be any candy left if we really needed it.  Another thing that worried me was that if the Russians dropped a bomb on Long Island, how safe would I be in a bomb shelter that was constructed on filled-in swampland with the bay just a few feet away?  Well, I guess I’d be safer than Angie at the elementary school.   There, if they had an air-raid drill, all they did was walk into the hall, face the wall, and put their hands over their heads and hope that the bomb didn't drop through the ceiling.  The fear I shared with every child of the Cold War was very real to me.  I had this image in my head of a control room behind a red iron curtain where a man stood poised over an electronic panel.  Beneath his fingers, lay a red button and at any moment he could push that button and missiles would be launched against the United States.  I took another long glance at the sky over the bay.  I was reassured to find that the sky was still empty of Russian missiles.

 

My friend, Heather, was waiting for me by the bicycle rack.  She had a spirit that defied her lot in life.  Heather and I had one thing in common that had made us best friends since kindergarten.  As the smallest girls in our grade, we watched as the other girls grew taller.  Our petite stature fortified our friendship and protected us from feeling left behind.  Our height was, however, where the physical similarities ended.  Her hair was as blonde as mine was dark, her eyes were round and blue while mine were almond shaped and brown.  And today, her blue eyes were rimmed with red.

 

          The bell rang and we made our way through the crowd to our lockers. Grabbing her arm and pulling her close, I jumped right in, “What’s going on with you?”  Heather looked like she was afraid that if she opened her mouth she might start crying right there in the middle of the hallway.  She clenched her jaw shut and just shook her head, miserably.

 

“You want to wait and talk at lunch?”

 

She nodded her head yes and I squeezed her hand before we parted to head toward our separate homerooms.  As I walked away, I kept turning around to check on her.  I was almost afraid to find out what her latest crisis was.  Heather’s dad had left when she was little.  She and her mom had lived with her grandmother for a while; but when that got to be “too much” (those were the words that her grandmother had used) they spent the following years moving from one rented house in the neighborhood, to another.  Her grandmother had died last year and now all she had was her mom.  Her mom must have inherited a little money from Heather’s grandmother, but if she did, it hadn’t seemed to make any difference in Heather’s life.  Except that maybe her mother had more money to buy booze.

 

My homeroom was at the end of the hall and it was for the kids with names at the end of the alphabet.  I hated being last because I was always put in the back where I was made to feel like a leftover.  This was especially a problem because of my height.  I would inevitably end up sitting at the back of a classroom with towering classmates sitting in front of me, totally blocking my view of the blackboard!  I promised myself that when I got married, I would marry someone whose name began with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet.  The teacher called my name for attendance, “Juliana Ventura?”  “Here.” I replied from somewhere in the depths of the classroom, beyond the sea of heads.  My teacher had to take a few steps to the right so that she could see my raised hand, then she checked off my name in her little book.

 

I had a hard time concentrating in my morning classes because I kept thinking about Heather.  When it was time for lunch I raced down to the cafeteria to meet her.  She looked a little better than she had in the morning, but she still seemed pale.

 

I gently coaxed her, “Do you feel like talking?”

 

In a barely audible voice, Heather mumbled, “My mom didn’t come home last night.”  This was not the first time that this had happened, so I didn’t understand why she continued to get so upset every time that it did.

 

“Okay, but she’s probably there now.  Maybe she just had to work late or something,” I reasoned.

 

Heather just stared at her lunch while I took a bite of my apple butter sandwich. “I’m sure she’ll be back by the time you get home,” I said with more conviction.  Heather’s eyes still didn’t leave her sandwich.

 

“Hey,” I tried to change the subject.  “Did I tell you we’re getting a colored television set today?”

 

“That’s cool,” she said rather flatly.

 

“Maybe you can come over this weekend and watch it with me?”

 

“Yeah, I guess.” 

 

My heart went out to her and I wanted so much to make everything better, but I just didn’t know how.   I thought about how horrible it would be to have an alcoholic parent.  At my house, the alcohol was in one of our living room end tables.  The bottles had been in there for at least ten years.  The only time they were taken out was on New Year’s Eve when my parents made whiskey sours, highballs, or screwdrivers.

 

“Wait for me after school and I’ll walk home with you,”

 

“Thanks, Julie.  You’re the best friend, ever!”

 

But I didn’t feel like I was the best friend ever.  I mean, really, what could I possibly do to help her?  After all, her life was a mess, and mine wasn’t much better.

 

As I went through the rest of the day, I tried to think happier thoughts. I kept wondering if the new television set had been delivered yet.  It was going to replace our old television that was built into a wood cabinet in the downstairs recreation room.  You had to open the doors to see the TV screen.  We also had a small black and white television set, with rabbit ear antennas, in our upstairs living room.  The downstairs TV didn’t need rabbit ears because it was hooked up to an antenna on our roof.  The small black and white would be brought up to our bedrooms when we were really sick.  Like the time all three of us girls got the chicken pox.  First Mary got sick and the doctor came to give the rest of us shots.  I remember running away from the doctor, but I finally got caught and he put me over his knee.  But the shot didn’t help.  I got the chicken pox anyway.

 

My last class was social studies and Donny DeLaney sat in the back of the room.  He rarely took off his black leather jacket.  Although he was the star of the wrestling team, he was a loner and didn’t seem to have any real friends.  The guys were afraid of him, but behind his back they made fun of him.   His great grandfather, Old Man Finster, was infamous in our town.  There were stories that he had murdered people with axes and kept their bodies buried in his yard.  The old man’s son, Sam, had had a reputation for being a tough angry young man and he had left his own legacy of terror before dying in a bar fight.  Sam’s daughter, Margaret, Donny's mother, found out she was pregnant while still in high school.  Margaret’s grandfather forced her to marry the baby’s father, Trevor DeLaney, and, as the story goes, in doing so, she had traded one prison for another.

 

 

Trevor had been the high school wrestling champion and his old wrestling trophies and photos still lined the showcases in the gym’s hallway.   It was obvious from the photos that he had been a handsome young man, but his eyes were as cold as stone.  It gave me the creeps just to look at those pictures.  These days, people just assumed that Donny was exactly like his father, so they steered clear of him.  But it seemed to me that he had never actually done anything to earn that reputation, except to be born into the Finster/DeLaney family.

 

Sometimes, Donny would look across the room at me and catch me staring at him.  His brooding eyes were a deep warm blue, so unlike his father’s, but still, they seemed haunted.  For an unguarded moment they would reveal a puzzled expression.  Then his eyelids would close like shades and when they opened the expression would be gone.  It was as if the real Donny was hiding behind this persona that everyone else had given him.  Those eyes held a million questions, and sometimes I felt as though he thought I had the answers.  This always made me feel uneasy, and today was no different.  When Social Studies class was over and the bell rang, I ran for my locker.

 

Heather was just coming out of the girls’ bathroom so I waited for her to get her jacket.  She was so quiet on the walk home that we may as well have been in a funeral procession.   When we finally reached her house, I was glad to see her mom’s car parked in the driveway.  Heather’s face lit up with relief but she hesitated at the front door.  “Julie, would you come in with me?”

 

I looked down at my watch, hesitantly, “Uh, sure.”  I held her hand as we walked through the front door.  She had only lived in this house for a couple of months and I had never been inside it before.  One of my father’s rules was that I had to come straight home from school.  I really wasn’t allowed to socialize during the school year and this was a hard rule for me to follow.  Sometimes, his rules made it difficult for me to have friends.  Heather seemed to be the only one who understood.  In the summer months, I had a bit more freedom, but the summer seemed a long way away as our breaths crystallized in the cold afternoon air. 

 

In addition to rules, my father had a lot of prejudices, so he didn’t like my being friends with anyone who was different.  Once, when I was eight, I asked if I could join the Pioneer Girls.  My father had exploded, “That’s run by Lutherans!”  The way he went on about Lutherans after that made it clear that he thought they were a mind-controlling cult bent on stealing me away from the Catholic Church.  I never asked again.

 

As I entered Heather’s house I reminded myself to make this quick.  The house was dark and musty and if it hadn't been for the light that poured in through the open front door, I might have fallen right into the gaping hole in her living room floor.   Heather let go of my hand and walked around it and up the stairs to her mom’s bedroom.  I wasn't sure if I should follow or not, so I just stood there staring at the hole.  I inched closer and peered into the darkness over the edge and down into the basement below.  I shivered, stepped back and closed the front door.  But the inside of the house wasn't much warmer than outside.  I wrapped my arms around my body to slow down the shaking.  I could still see my breath form in the air.  I carefully walked around the hole, sat down on her couch and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dim light.  The room was gloomy and sparsely furnished.  Dust had gathered in every corner and the floor had long ago lost its varnish.  Scratches evidenced where furniture had been scraped along the surface.  I was wondering if any had fallen to the basement below through the hole, when I heard a sound and looked up.

 

Heather slowly came back down the stairs.  Her small body shaking so hard I was afraid she’d fall.  When she reached the bottom step her anger flashed, “She’s so drunk I can’t even wake her!  She’s just snoring away in her bed and her room reeks of gin!”  Heather’s anger and frustration were bordering on hysteria.  I looked at my watch, it was already after four.  I knew that I needed to get going but I couldn't just leave Heather like this.

 

I took charge and led her to the kitchen, “Let’s get something to eat.”   In Italian families, you learn that food is comfort.  We opened the cupboard but there wasn't a whole lot there.  We did, however, find a box of chocolate cake mix.  Next I checked the refrigerator; there were eggs and milk so I placed all of the items on the kitchen table.  “Let’s make chocolate cake!  It always makes me feel better!” I tried to ignore the little voice in my head that was saying, “Go home, Julie,” as we mixed the cake.  I tried to think of an excuse I could give my mom.  Maybe I could say that I had stayed at school for extra help.  As long as it didn’t take too long, I’d be okay.

 

 

When we put the mixer on high speed, cake mix flew everywhere in the kitchen.  By the time we had the cake in the oven, we were laughing so hard that our sides ached.  We turned on her kitchen radio and sang along.  We danced around the kitchen and checked the cake every few minutes, opening the door to the oven to see if the cake was done.  About an hour later we were finally sitting at her kitchen table each with a giant (although a bit flat) piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk.  To me, there was nothing like warm, just-out-of-the-oven, chocolate cake.  I always ate the bottom and saved the top for last, because the top was my favorite part.  It was hard not to stuff it all in my mouth at once because it just smelled and tasted so good.  But I had learned that if you take your time and eat it slowly, it’s so much more satisfying.

 

“So is Donny DeLaney still staring at you in class?”  Heather asked with a giggle.  I was glad to see that Heather was thinking about something other than her mom, but I wasn’t too sure I liked this subject either.

 

I took a deep breath, “Yeah.”

 

“So, are you going to do anything about it?”

         

 “Like what?’

 

 “I don’t know.  Do you want me to ask him if he likes you?”

 

“No!”

 

“Oh, okay, I won’t.  But one of you has just got to do something or I’m going to get involved.”

 

“Don’t you dare!”   I grabbed a piece of cake and threw it at her!

 

“Hey!” She grabbed a piece and threw it at me and it landed in my hair.

 

When we were finally finished with our food fight, we both felt a lot better.  That is until I noticed the time, it was almost six o’clock!

         

“Sorry Heather, but I've got to get going.”

 

         

          “Don’t worry, I’ll clean it up.”  Suddenly the concern in the room shifted from her to me.

 

At my house, we ate dinner every night at five o’clock sharp.  My father got home at a quarter to five and we all sat together to eat dinner as a family.  My father sat in his seat with his belt slung over his lap.  We never ate out or ordered in.  My mother cooked all of our meals and she cooked them the way my father liked them.  Not too much garlic, no rice, and no broccoli.  As I walked past the hole in Heather’s living room again, I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. 

 

Like a condemned man walking to the electric chair I walked home as slowly as I could.  After all, I was already late.  Maybe if I delayed my arrival long enough I could come up with an excuse that he would accept.  About a block from my house, I saw him walking toward me.  He didn't say a word.  His face was set in stone when he grabbed my arm and just about dragged me home.  All my excuses died on my tongue before even getting a chance to escape through my clenched teeth.  The house was silent, although I could see that everyone was still in the kitchen.  The dinner sat cold on the table between them.  My mother and sisters sat there quietly, as I was pushed up the stairs.  In my room my dad took off his belt. I knew what was coming next.  His eyes were glazed with anger.  Usually, when he punished me, he’d hit me with the belt a few times.  But this time he just couldn't get the anger out of him.  So he just kept hitting.  When he finally stopped, I could hear crying. Then I realized, through my own tears, that he was crying too.  His voice cracked as he said, “Don’t you ever do that again!”  He turned away from me and went downstairs, back to his dinner.

 

Later that night, after my mother had spread Mercurochrome on the fresh cuts across my back, I lay on my stomach in bed on top of the cool sheets.  I listened as my family gathered downstairs in the recreation room around the new color TV.  And in the darkness of my room, I tried to imagine the colors that were surely outlining the screen.  I reached my hand out, and in my mind, I felt the rainbow against my fingertips.