Chapter Two
CHAPTER T WO



While looking for a slipper, I found my journal in a box under my bed. Incredible! I flipped through the pages between faux-leather red bookcovers and discovered that three years had passed since I last poured out my heart on paper, which eventually would relinquish my body to sleep, sometimes reinforced by Valium. Page one began: January 1, 1978, two-fifty-seven a.m. I read until my heart lurched and sickened me. I'd listened, "FOR THE LAST TIME" to Gary Murphy's promise that we'd marry, "someday" At least that decision had activated me and by the end of the month, I'd signed a contract to buy my wonderful second-floor in a handsome red brick and stone Victorian townhouse on the edge of Chicago's Old Town, two blocks south of North Avenue and Second City.
I paged forward and read the last entry. My chest tightened as my flesh chilled:
He'll be dead in six months. Daddy-O has cancer — lymphoma, which kills in six months, he said.
That was it, but how could I not have recorded the joy that had swept through us when the doctor told Daddy-O that his 1950s encyclopedia was hopelessly outdated and he could expect many years of life ahead?
Even after that horrific week of trying not to think about losing him, I couldn't concentrate on work, nor could I sleep much, or get my weight above one-fifteen, ancient responses to times of intensity. I couldn't escape horrible fear until my father returned to his law practice the day after his first round of chemotherapy, precedent for each treatment thereafter, until he finished the series. He beat it.
Maybe. Remission didn't mean cured.
I propped up my pillows, found a pen in my night table drawer and, on a fresh blue-lined page I wrote:
July 16, 1981: Mother lost a breast to cancer last February. I can't believe I never wrote about that in here. She still isn't a hundred percent. At least I got to see for myself how she was doing. She should be a lot stronger by now, are they telling me the truth?
But she doesn't have cancer now. She'll be herself again. Soon. Congestive heart failure after chemo would weaken anyone.
They're both FINE. Me too.
The next thing I knew, the pen dropped from my stiffened fingers. It was after eight.
In the kitchen, I scrambled eggs with Swiss cheese and onions, and toasted the last English muffin. Taking dinner to bed, I turned on the TV and, during commercials, read my new entry.
I grabbed a pen as I chewed my first bite.
I've become what I once most feared. But it's nothing like great-Aunt Pauline, the personification of spinsterhood, I once believed. My teen self never would have believed that I would choose to be a spinster at thirty-five. But who could have predicted that I'd shelve "love and marriage" with stories of Santa, Robin Hood, God and Peter Pan. Actually, I loved saying that I never married my mistakes. The truth of the truth is that, beyond my immediate family, no man ever has offered the quality of unconditional love in which I grew up. They established the standard by which I judged the love, character and style of those with whom I'd share free time. Perhaps what scared me most about spinsterhood was hearing that great-Aunt Pauline had clawed the cheek of the only man who'd tried to kiss her on her first, and last, date. I had to dance with the broom in dancing school, never with one of the boys. I couldn't bear the thought of ending up like my aunt. But of course I love men, no doubt because of dear Daddy-O and my sweet baby brother first called Kip, Kippy, and then Michael.
Michael and I were disconnected for a few years and then, joy of joy, by coincidence, we landed at the same time in the Heartland of America, ninety minutes away from each other by car, train, bus.
Men didn't scare me as they had old great Aunt Pauline, my inability to love wisely did. My second broken heart made that fact absolutely clear. My parents, Blanche and Clarence Obletz, are extraordinary, which I didn't know until a few of my classmates at Parsons School of Design divulged their lives as helpless children in the hands of monsters. My parents set the standard by which I measure the love, character and style of those I invite to share my free time. Lucky for me I met Jake last year, and that he convinced me that we were perfect for each other. After all, marriage was no longer on my to-do list, and he said he'd never leave his wife. It took a few months for me to see how right he was, and now life again has the excitement of one on one romance.
Hindsight says 1978 was the worst year of my life.
The pen slid from my lap and I let the pillows take me. Everyone was fine now.
Relief spread through my body like novocaine numbing the unbearable pain of knowing my parents' vulnerability.
The worst was over.
Summer awaited me and, not only would I paint again, I'd land a new employer. Enough of never-ending hostility between creative and marketing departments, between me and those who wanted my job.
A weight I'd forgotten lifted.
My heart beat faster.
I picked up my journal, shrinking my script to save space, each page with its own train of thought. Fast trains, speeding me into self-sating passion, a hot rush, intoxicating as no external intoxication could be; not wine, not pot, not —
I no longer slept much. I didn't need to any longer. I was pain-free and free to write whatever, however, I wanted.
Last night I didn't sleep at all. And I wasn't tired. I could run around the block.
Just before dawn, the notion of sleep disturbed me by its absence. I turned off the light and curled up on my side. My thoughts pushed sleep away, again and again. Sleep empowered recuperation, but the last time I'd slept was — I couldn't remember.
I tried Valium. Thirty milligrams did nothing.
Sleep didn't matter when work didn't set the alarm. But it would, all too soon. The annual schedule of thirty-two new beauty products and promotions was so black with type that just looking at it made my stomach cramp. From rough to final copy and art, the projects overlapped, and every week had at least one deadline and two crises.
I felt an unkind kinship with the bottles on the fill line in the factory below my office, where little more than the names changed.
I slid out of bed and checked the calendar on the kitchen counter. Sunday was days away. I made a note to get the Chicago Tribune and set it down beside my calendar on the counter by the phone.
When friends mentioned work I begged them not to — the impending of my return felt like doom. They understood, my fine dear friends, and we spoke of other matters.
My parents called from Florida, my brother Michael and sister-in-law Cindy checked in from their place in Milwaukee. Love for them overflowed into phrases, paragraphs, pages, revealing every life I'd lived from infancy on, every track, path, blind alley.
Twelve addresses in three cities: two houses, ten apartments. The houses were in Buffalo, New York, home of my first eighteen years.
The inside and outside of the house we moved into when I was five was a vivid memory. Why couldn't I remember the inside of the house we'd lived in until then?
Mithe would know.
But it was three in the morning and she wasn't yet free from the side effects of chemotherapy and congestive heart failure. She needed sleep.
Sweat stung my eyes. My heartbeat filled my ears. My tongue became coated and dry, too big for my mouth. Everything inside me felt racy, my head was so light. A new strain of dizziness. I swung my legs out from under the table and my head dropped between my knees.
Five hours separated me from my mother's awakening. Five hours stood between me and my first five years, that match of numbers symbolic, significant, so right. I could wait.
Fear of falling asleep had begun in that house.
The war between Maggie and me had begun in that house. I remembered nothing about the room we shared after Michael's birth.
My impression of terror in that house grew.
I remembered the night I thought German bombs were exploding around us. I'd had a strangle-hold on my mother, dear Mithe, I was on the front stairs with her. She'd been hugging me, saying, "It's okay, it's okay. Everybody's celebrating our country's victory in Europe." We'd huddled on those stairs for what had seemed like hours. I had no sense of my father being there, none of Maggie. Why?
Mother needed sleep. She needed sleep.
The closet Maggie and I tore apart surfaced, the spankings our father meted. The bombs, the closet — why nothing else?
My mother, my Mithe, would want me to call. I had amnesia. I needed help. I had to find my first five years.
The bombs, the closet — my first school, trees rising from lush grass, green lace above one-story, low-slung wooden buildings, fat drippings from leaves in thick falling rain, the splat of their landing slower, softer, less rhythmic than the rain striking my rubber coat; the squish, the squelch of my boots, the tin-throated rush of water through gutters. Why didn't I remember snow, or sun, or Maggie? She'd been a class or two ahead of me there. Why were there no people in my memory of that school? Why were there no classrooms? I needed — I needed to forget what I'd forgotten and explore what I knew.
Six apartments in eleven years in New York City. Four addresses in six years in Chicago. Only my last and current residence was spiritually and financially mine, husband for my future. My womb, my fortress, my Sherwood Forest, walls colored from my palette. I dearly so loved my home, matching harmony within me. I'd lost this spiritual sense of belonging twenty years ago. But I was again at home, my own glade, my cave.
I entered my white-framed evergreen living room and gazed up at the twelve-foot ceilings, their elegance worth high heating bills. I glanced out the bay windows that overlooked the cul de sac park. Century plus old townhouses across the street continued the elegance of my home.
I loved the sweep of my forest green to-the-floor curtains, the fireplace behind dark glass doors framed in black metal and brass. I gazed at my living room one more time before I passed between the ceiling high bookcases flanking the entrance to the dining room, on to the kitchen for more coffee, back to the typewriter.
I forgave myself for failing to learn why Gary Murphy kept postponing our wedding. And I blessed him for getting me out of Manhattan and into the perfect beauty of Chicago.
It no longer mattered whether our failure was his fault or mine.
My body floated above the chair, buoyed by my release from heartbreak. I was so dearly, clearly happy, so whole, so completely complete.



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Journal July 24, 1981


Until peace arrives:
Question negatives that interfere with healthy positives.


Critically Aclaimed Expressionist Art by Patricia Obletz (414) 444-4579