Chapter 5B

In December 1953 my Mom married and my stepfather moved into the apartment temporarily while they searched for a new house. The ceremony was little more than a small tea party in a room in the reception house at St. Mary's Church. This being my mother's second marriage, she didn't think a large wedding would be appropriate, and my conservative step-dad agreed. They took over the old bedroom, and I slept on the pullout sofa in the living room.

Business problems at my stepdad's supermarket and the rush to find a new home caused them to postpone their honeymoon. But near Easter, 1954, they announced that a house had been found and purchased, and before moving in they were going to take their honeymoon week in St. Louis. The concept of a honeymoon was rather a vague one for me. Mom said it was just a "vacation" people take when they marry, so they can get used to each other's habits (Even with my limited knowledge of the marriage state, I knew better than that! My relationship with Mom certainly had not improved).

Shortly after that announcement, I came home from school one day, the last day before the start of my school's Easter holidays. There in the kitchen with my mother sat Martha Jane, sipping coffee and chatting merrily away!

She said as my eyes bulged out of my head, "Well, Hi!"

I could tell--immediately--that her Southern accent had thickened. It was still the same musical voice, a bit rambunctious now, a little louder and more confident. But the same eyes; a more slender neck and arms, and definitely an older and more adult figure. She was 20. Her hair was the same, a little longer, a little more blonde.

She gaped at me. "Well, hotshot, are you gonna speak?"

I did, but I didn't hear what my own voice said. I was dumbfounded. It was Martha Jane, but it wasn't Martha Jane. She was the same person, yet she wasn't. She was not a teenager anymore. And she smoked cigarettes. One dangled lazily from her fingers as she sat cross-legged at the kitchen table with Mom.

Mom said, "Say hello to Martha Jane." She laughed. "You alrady forget who she is?"

Dazed, I asked, "I did. I said hello, didn't I?" They both shook their heads no and waited for me, amused. I said falteringly, "Well, then, uh--" I shrugged helplessly -- "Hi."

Martha Jane rose from the chair. "Oh, what kind of welcome is that?" She walked across the room -- on noisy high-heeled shoes! -and came straight to me, moving the cigarette from one hand to the other so she would be able to give me a big hug without burning me with the thing. I was grateful for the hug. Deeply grateful. But my feelings were so firmly entrenched, especially when I was around my mother, that I denied myself the luxury of any response at all.

"Let me look at YOU!" Martha Jane exclaimed. "You're barely as tall as I a now! Can't you grow any faster than that?"

I shrugged and blushed. "I'm only 12 years old," I said.

"Well, that won't last forever, hon, don't worry." She took my hand and leaned closer to me. "How are you, Speedy? Did you forget all about me, after all I had to put up with from you?"

"I didn't forget," I smiled. I was overcome by a blush attack that I strongly resisted. She saw my problem, and immediately she gave a sympathetic "Aawww, c'mere..." She put her arms around me and gave a stronger, more affectionate hug. "How are you, hon? I haven't seen you in so long."

I saw my mother watching us, pleased. But not trusting myself, I pulled back and simply gave Martha Jane an appreciative nod.

My mother announced: "Martha Jane lost her job."

Martha Jane shrugged. "Laid off." She shrugged again. "What the heck! At least I'm still getting the GI Bill money because of my father. All I have to say is, 'Thank you, Uncle Sam!'"

My Mom went on, "Martha Jane showed up just in time. While your daddy and I are in St. Louis on our honeymoon next week, your Aunt Yvonne was supposed to drop by here and check up once in a while so you wouldn't be here all by yourself. But Yvonne caught appendicitis and had it took out, and she can't handle a part time babysitter job. So... guess who showed up just in time to take her place?"

I didn't answer. I was afraid to.

With a big smile my mother nudged her head toward Martha Jane. "Your old girlfriend over there."

I looked at Martha Jane.

She pointed her thumb at herself. "The old supervisor herself, hon. Yvonne got fired, I got hired. Gonna be living next store again anyway, so why should Yvonne have to traipse all the way over here?" She moved closer to me again and pointed a finger into my chest. "Gonna be checkin' on you, buster. Better clean up your act."

My act, considering how little I revealed of myself at that instant, couldn't have been more antiseptic. My feelings were in chaos. She didn't seem the same. She moved and spoke with an aggressiveness I found difficult to accept. Nor was it so easy for me to switch emotional gears after two years of not seeing her, having spent that time surrounded by people in whom I had so little trust emotionally.

The next day, a Saturday, Mom and my new dad departed for their honeymoon from Memphis' Union Station. At this grandiose Victorian railroad terminal, a number of people were present to see them off. I had not attended many of the recent parties, nor had I spent much time among my step-dad's family. But most of the people who dropped by to see my parents off were my step-dad's folks. They were a friendly, earthy group, outgoing and likeable. But the sight of the sheer size of his family was intimidating -- my step-dad's immediate family had fifteen brothers and sisters. That afternoon at Union Station I discovered that on the day Tony married my mother, I instantly acquired over three hundred new cousins and an undetermined number of uncles and aunts! I had yet to meet most of them, a task I estimated would take years.

I spent the rest of the day Saturday with my paternal grandparents, the Ricci's. And later that afternoon Grandpa Joe Ricci, my father's father, packed me into his dark crimson Oldsmobile to give me a ride back to the project.

As he drove he griped, "Don't see why you can't spend the rest of the week with me and your Grandma Rose."

"I have too many things to do at home, Grandpa Joe. I got a dozen library books over there to go through while my Mama and Daddy are gone."

"Your 'Daddy'!" Grandpa Joe swore mildly in his gravelly voice. "He ain't your daddy. Your daddy was Steven Joseph, Senior. And he's dead."

"My step-daddy, then."

"Ha! There ya go. That's better."

I didn't know if I really wanted to see Martha Jane or not. She called my apartment from a friend's place and told me she was packing the last of her things to move back to the project, then she had to change and go to a funeral. She said she would be job hunting all day Monday. But she'd come over tonight, Saturday, and the next night as well, and fix dinner for me. I was on Easter vacation, a mixed advantage of being in a Catholic grammar school, because I had a week off but no friends and nothing I particularly wanted to do. But it was still better than being bored all week with my relatives. I spent most of the remainder of Saturday fiddling around the apartment, which seemed roomy with no one home but me. Over the years I had spent so much time alone that I began to appreciate its positive side: I had absolute freedom of movement, without being hassled by the foibles and demands of others, especially of grownups.

But as Saturday evening neared, I was considering whether or not to be home at the time Martha Jane was due to fix dinner. I did not trust my feelings at all. I could always hop a bus and go back to my godparents or grandparents for the whole week...

In my mind she had changed. She was not the simple girl-woman I knew. She wore high heels. She smoked. She talked loud.

She showed up shortly before six. She greeted me with a hug, and when she saw I appeared numb she insisted that I give her cheek a hello kiss, after which she set her purse down on a table in the living room and went into the kitchen to make dinner.

I stared at her purse. It was one of those slick black patent leather purses that adult women carried around. It seemed she moved faster, too, or maybe it was an illusion created by her seemingly longer legs and the heels. From the kitchen she asked what I wanted to eat. I told her I didn't care. As she prepared to warm up some Campbell's soup and some vegetables in that tiny kitchen with the obsolete refrigerator and the two-burner gas stove, she kept joking and seemed in fine humor.

"Won't you be tickled pink to get out of this tiny place and into that big new house out on Macon Road? Got a nice big kitchen in there, I saw it. Your mom drove me out there last week."

"Last week?" I asked, confused. I didn't know she had been around for almost a whole week before seeing me.

"Yes, hon, last weekend, you know? I *missed* you, I asked them where you were, and you were at your grandmother's all weekend."

"My mom didn't call me," I muttered. Betrayed by mom again!

"Well, she couldn't. I couldn't stay long anyway. Rent Overdue, Speedy, I had to move out of that apartment. Heck, I sure collected a ton of junk in there." She was setting the table but she stopped to grin at me. "You're gonna love that house. It's new, all *new*, not a scratch on it! Even the grass is new. And three bedrooms, hon. See this--?" She held up three fingers -- "Three bedrooms! You'll have your own room, and to heck with that sofa bed in there."

I was not overly pleased. "I guess it'll be okay," I muttered, moving to take my seat at the small table. "I could learn to like it."

She came over to me. She bent down. I became very aware of her breasts--not her pert teengirl titties, but her adult female breasts under the white blouse and inside the white bra. She hugged me from one side and her voice softened. She said earnestly, "You need your own room, hon. You need your... own... room." She emphasized the last three words. She pulled back and looked at me. "My lord! How old are you now, about forty-five?"

"Umpteen," I answered blandly.

She laughed. "Does it really feel that way?"

"And you?" I asked as she sat in the chair before me.

"Umpteen," she answered, with a wry chuckle "Closer to twenty, really. Speedy, you look wonderful. You're getting so cute. And you're growin' up so fast. I thought you'd be a little taller, though. Don't you eat your spinach?"

I didn't answer.

She said, "You look like your daddy's picture."

"I know," I said.

"Bet every aunt and uncle you know tells you that at least once every fifteen minutes, don't they?"

"Yep," I said, aware of the dull tone in my voice.

"Mm, well... Not everybody that flew B-17's and B-24's won a Silver Star, hon." She chewed her food and swallowed, and her face and voice became more serious, more leveled. "Doesn't mean you have to win a Silver Star too, Speedy."

I didn't know what to say to her. I didn't know exactly what she meant, but I did feel that she knew so very much more about me than I did.

She said, with a mouth half full of spinach, "You didn't say you missed me."

"Well," I said, "I did. I'm not as talkative as I used to be."

"Tell me something I hadn't noticed," she said dryly. "You don't smile as much, either. Of course, you also don't clown or blush or shuffle around. Those are improvements, anyway." She swallowed her food and wiped her lips with the napkin. For a brief moment she looked at me, just looking, watching my face. She said evenly, "You're getting to be too nice looking a young man to be that painfully shy. You're growin' up. Guess we all have to grow up sooner or later."

"I guess."

"So how do you like it?"

"Like what?" I asked.