Smoke Damage

By Patti Sherry-Crews

"Smoke Damage" is a heartfelt chronicle about growing up on the suburban edge of a large city when life in the United States was still simple -- children spent the days roaming alleys and vacant lots unsupervised, building underground forts, visiting mom and pop stores to stock up on penny candy, engaging in harmless fistfights, and spending restless nights thrashing among damp sheets before the advent of air conditioning.
The protagonist, Kathy, in this novel is the daughter of a firefighter father and housekeeper mother whose lives are deceptively quiet. Their routines are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a single mom who introduces flashy clothes and her own sense of style and adventure.
As the father falls ill, the mother drifts away -- to her new job outside the home and her close woman friend -- leaving her two young daughters to cope with their emerging adolescence. The two teen-age girls experience feelings of powerlessness and resentment, as they try to cater to their father's illness, mood swings, and growing demands. It is not until their mother dies that they learn the secrets she buried away -- too late for them to share and draw closer to her, but at a time when they are old enough to sympathize rather than judge.
When the novel begins, Kathy is a young mother, herself, living and raising children in the town where she grew up -- but in a more upscale neighborhood. As an adult she revisits her childhood memories where events rapidly decline in both her family and environment: Her father’s chronic illness alters family life at the same time life outside her home changes. A once stable neighborhood becomes a risky place to live as long-time residents move out and transients, substance abusers and drug dealers move in.
As a mother Kathy is determined not to make the same mistakes her parents made in raising her own children, and yet not only does she fall into some of the same traps, but has to cope with a world in which many threatening changes are out of her control such as terrorist attacks, climate change, and a failing economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patti Sherry-Crews
• Release date: Aug 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476299532

Patti Sherry-Crews

Patti Sherry-Crews lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her two children and husband. She has a degree in anthropology/archaeology, a fifteen-year stint as a shop-owner, a fondness for the British Isles, the Old West, and performing food experiments in her kitchen. Her aim is to create compelling characters who are smart and have interesting stories to tell. Armchair travel included. When she’s not playing with cowboys and Indians, she writes contemporary fiction and hopes to try her hand at medieval romance in the near future. Under the name Cherie Grinnell, she has written a series of steamy romances set in Ireland and Wales

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SMOKE DAMAGE

by

Patti Sherry-Crews

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Patti Sherry-Crews

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Table of Contents

MYSTERIOUS INTERSECTIONS

COURTSHIP

NIGHTIME PART 1

ITS ALMOST LIKE LIVING IN A RESORT

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION….

ALLEY GAMES

PINKY AND SIS WHEN THEY ARE AT HOME

NIGHTTIME PART 2

RELIGION IN BRIEF

THE BLUEST SKIES

WAR IS DECLARED

LIVING IN AN ALARMED STATE

GROWING UP FIREMAN

CAPTURE THE FLAG

I’M SO OUTTA HERE

CH-CH-CHANGES

OBAMA DAWN

NIGHTIME PART III

THINGS GET WORSE

WHY IS EVERYONE RUNNING?

NIGHT TIME IV

THE OTHER WOMAN

ANOTHER SEPTEMBER WE COULD’VE DONE WITHOUT

THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

YARD SIGNS

SOME PEOPLE DIE

AND SOME OF THOSE DEAD PEOPLE HAD SECRETS

NIGHT TIME V

MYSTERIOUS INTERSECTIONS

I dreaded this stretch of road. Green Bay Road between Simpson and Noyes. Here were four lanes of traffic, moving fast, with a wall of concrete raising like a frozen tsunami on one side and a large, indifferent bus roaring up fast on the other. Both forces towered over my Chrysler minivan and were so close a passenger in my car could reach out and touch them. There was no wiggle room here, squeezed between the two mighty masses. Stray one way or the other and die. And I was at the wheel. Maybe even take out a few other families driving on the road. The job-weary bus drivers seemed to believe that might makes right, and were prone to change lanes without warning or consideration, knowing everyone had to get out of their way. I was a spatially challenged person on foot who was known to cut corners short or crash into standing objects for no reason. I often had bruises on my arms and legs I couldn‘t explain, so put me at the wheel of a speeding hulk of metal and you can imagine it was not a good situation.

Kids seem to have a sixth sense about these things, so this, of course, was when my kids decided to have a fight. Verbal abuse escalated to a backseat scuffle. I try to ignore them as my husband would advise and I put up the imaginary glass shield between the front and back seats. I am a chauffeur, that is all. As long as no projectiles made their way into my compartment and threaten to render me unconscious at the wheel, I am good. I knew Morgan, my daughter, was at fault. I had listened to her teasing her younger brother, Max, since we left the grocery store, but it was his whiny voice intoning the phrase Stop, stop over and over again that finally got to me. It was like chewing on tin foil or listening to the dentist drill and it was the whine that made me snap finally.

I reached behind me, between the seats, never taking my eyes off the road. My fingers found a patch of warm flesh. It was so sweet and warm, that patch of hairless flesh, that I have loved, bathed and clothed over these last years of my life, yet without taking my eyes off the road I pinched. Hard. Now I had two kids screaming like banshees in stereo behind me.

I remember hearing once in an argument against corporal punishment that if you hit because it made you feel better then that was bad. When is it good to hit a child? I don’t remember if they explained that. Like maybe if they were about to race in front of a speeding car and all you could do to save them would be to slap them to the ground, for instance, just off the top of my head that might be justifiable. So, call me abusive, but I did feel a little better for about 2 seconds until the crying started. I wasn’t even sure which one was crying or whom I’d pinched. Maybe it would bring them together.

Hey, guys, I’m really sorry, but this is a very, very dangerous road, and I need to focus on driving. It would be very easy for us to crash into the wall or swerve into the next lane and get into a head-on collision, so could you just shut up! I shrieked like a madwoman at the wheel, which annoyed even me. God, I sounded neurotic.

They were properly stunned into silence.

And don’t think I don’t know who the instigator is! I added. OK, I’d officially done it, I’d become my father. How many times had he leveled that at me after giving both my sister and me hell for fighting? He didn’t know how the fight started, but he was sure I’d started it. He was probably right. Boredom tends to make tormentors out of siblings.

I needed to put my mind on something else. Here is a game I play in my head when driving down Green Bay Road: it is called Find The Intersection Where We Turned To Get To Angela’s House, and it was a good game because it would never be solved. The only person who could solve the problem was dead. That dead person would be my mother.

I live up here now, but when I was a child I lived on the other side of the tracks, literally, and my first trip up to North Evanston left a big impression.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in the much poorer section of town made up of small wood frame houses or maybe a brick bungalow where working class families lived. We were a self contained little enclave with everything a person could need within walking distance. There really wasn’t any need to even leave the four block area. Not to go to school. Not to go to church. Not even to go to the grocery store. All of the above were right there. My parents both grew up there too, so even any relatives we had, lived a block away.

But, one year when I was in fifth grade, my best friend, Angela, moved, which is a devastating turn of events for a girl of that age. Her mother remarried and it must have been a step up for her because they moved out of the small wood frame Barn Red house, a popular color at the time, and resumed their lives in a more expensive patch on the other side of town in a big brick Georgian. I’ve always hankered after that style of home since that day.

My mother, knowing how sad I was arranged to drive me up to Amelia’s new house for an afternoon. One reason I have such a vivid memory of this drive was, and I think I’m right here, that this was perhaps the only time my mother drove me to a friend’s house for a play date. Did we even have such a term as play date back in the sixties? I don’t think so. Everyone was within walking distance. Now I spend half my day chauffeuring my kids to play dates or other activities. So, this was a standout kind of day.

We were not leaving Evanston, but I had never been to this neighborhood before, so it was like we were in a different town entirely. We drove down Green Bay (probably I was in the front seat without a safety belt) and it was strikingly ugly. I have this impression of shades of gray and cold concrete. On one side of the road was the train embankment which rose up straight from the curb into an endless wall of cracked concrete. Above that grew weeds. Any garbage blowing down the street was finally trapped here in leafless, gnarly tree branches and scrub. These were the sort of trees that never enjoyed a best season. While the other maples, oaks and elms for which Evanston is known for were changing brilliantly in the Fall, I’m sure these grim survivors maintained their sooty, leafless appearance. Covered in film from car exhaust from below and whatever train belches from above, these horrific stunted, suggestions of trees lined one side of the street.

The other side was even less appealing. At least there was a hint of nature on the embankment as aberrant as it was. Across the way, the road was a hodge podge of odd little businesses and light industry. There was no walking traffic to speak of, so there was no attempt to charm-up the store fronts which seemed to open directly onto the street without introduction of a parkway They included a muffler repair, printing presses and other light industry storefronts. I just have the impression in my mind of gray. Gray buildings. Gray air. Gray light. It was so ugly that it disturbed me.

And then we turned right into a tunnel that led under the train tracks.

The viaduct we passed under was broken concrete, rusty metal supports, graffiti and pigeons. But, just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the car emerged from the tunnel into a verdant vista. While everything was gray on one side of the viaduct, here everything was green. Forty shades of green, so even the light seemed tinged with green. Noise and traffic on one side. Sweeping lawns, elegant homes and dead peace and quiet on the other as if someone had laid a thick green blanket over everything on that side of the viaduct. It was like stepping through the looking glass or the hidden door that leads into the secret garden. Or like in the movie The Wizard of Oz when they are in Kansas and the film is in black and white, but turns to color when Dorothy finds herself transported by the twister to Oz.

What did we do that day, my friend and I? Did we have fun? I don’t remember. Maybe we caught up with each other’s lives. I don’t even think I ever saw her again after that day.

The following fall we went to different schools and met new friends, and I remember little about her. What has stayed with me all these years was that ugly/ beauty contrast and how it astounded me. Completely astounded me and took up residence in my head. Guess where I ended up living? Yes, on the right side of the tracks. My husband, Ned, and I bought a fixer upper literally across from the tracks, like a tired but victorious marathon runner who stumbles across the finish line and then immediately collapses. That is our position: turn right off of Green Bay, make a hard left and there we are the first house on the left. We are as close as you can come to the tracks without being on the wrong side of them.

We live on the historic Green Bay Trail. The trail is an ancient Indian trade route that extends to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and was often marked by trees bent as saplings into living signposts. Nowadays the trail parallels the metro tracks and, depending on the maintenance allowance of each suburb it passes through was paved, graveled, cleared, or marked all the way to Kenosha, I believe.

It is a popular biking and running path. And not only do we live on it, we live exactly where most people choose to pick it up. So, on Saturday or Sunday mornings while my family sleeps in before turning on the TV, or in the case of my husband, Ned, listening to Car Talk on NPR, I sit with my third cup of coffee and watch the other families unpacking Burlies and bikes from their cars to hit the trail.

I often wonder what it would be like to be one of these families. I wish we were more like them but have given up on that dream. Maybe secretly, I don’t really want to do that anyway, and I’m glad I have a lazy family who demands so little of me. I get to maintain the appearance of being keen to do all sorts of things except I am burdened with this lazy family.

So, we’ve lived here on the North Side for about fifteen years. I like to say that we are victims of public television. All those DIY shows like This Old House inspired us to buy what was considered a tear down by most.

Those shows are so damned inspiring. They perform miracles in the blink of an eye and explain, step by step, how you can do the same. It went for a song, because it was a freaking mess, which enabled us to move into a neighborhood that was clearly outside of our league. We made a good start at it, but since the kids came along we’ve sort of run out of steam. A lot of unfinished work here. I have someone else’s sink still in a chunk of someone else’s counter up on saw horses in my kitchen, while my gorgeous stainless steel apron fronted sink sits in a box in the garage. As I recall it is very elegant. We couldn’t decide on new kitchen cabinets, so we gave up and moved our old ones back. They sit on felt pads and are not attached, which is actually kind of handy because we can move them around and try out new arrangements. But you know we have a nice, big yard and live in a great neighborhood.

I love my neighbors. They have become my family. Only not in the annoying, dysfunctional way of the extended family I grew up in. I would have to think twice about moving away from here. Even if somebody offered me a big house with everything a person could want like say, a kitchen sink, I‘d probably turn it down. I like that we live in a large town close to the big city, but our own neighborhood is like a village within the whole. I like that I can’t leave the house without running into friends.

The Embankment I recalled as such a blight, got a face lift in recent years. At some expense, the city cleaned up the strip by planting native plants like prairie grasses and wildflowers. They have also tiered it in places and built a low wall with Illinois limestone, but only on one side.

The viaducts are still an eyesore. The railroad owns them and won’t do much but paint them sometimes. The sidewalks under them are still covered in pigeon poop like bat guano, which freaks the kids out.

The stores on the other side of the road have spruced up their appearance too. On the whole it looks much better, with the occasional clinker thrown in like the Car Wash, but what can you do? It is Evanston after all, not Kenilworth.

So, anyway, now that I live here, I try to recreate that feeling I had when I was a kid crossing over for the first time, so to speak. There are only so many intersections it could be. Four to be precise, but none of them is exactly quite right. It couldn’t be our intersection because you go under the viaduct and enter a business district with shops, a movie theater (or at least there used to be) and even a stadium for god’s sake, so obviously count that intersection out, because who would forget a stadium, which leaves three likely candidates.

Two of the intersections have big brick colonial style houses and hints of the golf course that runs along the canal (did I mention there is a drainage canal that cuts through our section of town?), so that would account for the unbelievable amount of greenery, but one street is too busy and one street you don’t see houses right away as I remembered. The third intersection has too many wood frame houses. My vision is of brick. I don’t know why I play this game of try to remember the intersection, because it’s not really important. This is just a way I amuse myself.

I try to remember what we did that day as a way of finding clues. I remember throwing a ball against the wall of some public building and tramping through the woods that border the canal. There are a number of schools and field houses around here and again, none them are quite right.

Stupidly, I could have asked my mother a hundred times where my friend’s house was, but I sort of liked the challenge of trying to figure it out myself. I say stupidly because now I’ve lost my chance forever to solve this mystery. Who would have thought my mother would die when she did at 67. She was the most vital, life-loving person I knew and she has been dead about eight years now. Pancreatic cancer.

So, here I am in the Secret Garden. The other side of the Looking Glass, right on the Green Bay Trail.

COURTSHIP

When people speak about the Miracle of Life, I think they are usually referring to the whole cosmic spark of life, biochemical happening that results in human life despite having all the odds stacked against it. Or maybe, if they are of a religious bend and they think of the Miracle of Life in terms of hand-outs from God plus a preordained set of instructions imprinted in your brain, a road map to your destiny, in other words.

When I speak of the miracle of life, it is after looking at my kids and thinking it is a miracle they are whole and perfect. They are both attractive, intelligent children, not yet touched by any signs of madness; despite the previous generation’s random couplings, grand passions gone awry, alcohol-inspired breeches of self-respect leading to yet more random couplings, and so many forbearers generally hooking up with the wrong people for the wrong reasons, resulting in them being here on earth.

Yes, some of us had a plan, but for the most part it was just sperm and egg bumping into each other that resulted in what I call my family. And because the sperm and egg kept bumping into each other in Evanston, this town has been the family spawning grounds for generations.

I can’t help but look at this town in layers like an archaeologist at a dig site looking at exposed strata, one human habitation stacked on top of another. I can look at Mount Trashmore, which is our rather cleverly named city dump turned reclaimed earth hill, and see it as the big open garbage pit that my grandmother sledded down and hit a broken bottle. Cut off her pinkie finger, but her mother being a tough bird from the old country, sewed it back on. She then tied a stone over the wound. Grandma said she had a special small, polished black stone she called her healing stone and she applied to kith and kin when required. Dad backed up this story, saying many the time he had to lie down with a rock wrapped around his head.

Now Mount Trashmore is where we go sledding in the winter. The old garbage pit where Evanstonians dumped their trash was filled and filled until it became a large hill. Concave to convex in two generations.

Sometimes I can’t walk around this town without seeing a ghost village. I look at the tennis courts in North Evanston and see that is where my great grandfather let out his teams of horses to graze about 100 years ago. Or the spot where an office building now stands is where Wiebolt’s department store used to be. It was where my mom got her first job. All the young ladies who worked there would make themselves up at the makeup counter before leaving for the day and going to meet their boyfriends at the Woolworth’s soda fountain, which is also now gone.

Of course, I didn’t see these things with my own eyes, but have been told these stories over and over again to the point of boredom (Stop. Stop), so they are a part of me I cannot shed. My family loved to tell stories. Many an the evening we’d spend sitting around some relative’s kitchen table listening to the older folks telling stories, the same stories over and over again. We did that on both sides of the family. Nobody seems to do that so much anymore. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

My Parents Meet:

Here is the story of how my parents fell in love as told to me by my mother. My mother, Joanne, had a best friend named Kiki, who was Greek. The two of them would run around with their jeans rolled up into cuffs above their penny loafers. Shinny pennies fitted into slots on top of their shoes. They were tomboys who liked to go to the fields when there used to be fields around here before real estate got so expensive, and fill their pockets with garden snakes.

However, one day Kiki got a little hormonal and discovered how stimulating it was to go over to Boltwood Park Field House and watch the Catholic boys play basketball. My mother was from a family with fervid anti-Catholic sentiments, so this new activity was problematic for my mother, but she trusted Kiki who was the only other girl she knew who caught snakes and enjoyed sports so as much as she did.

The field house is now long gone and has been replaced by the ice skating rink I take my daughter to for her figure skating lessons. Even the park has been renamed Robert Crown Park in a move I have always considered offensive. I have no idea who Boltwood was, but he must have been someone who did something, so how can we just chuck him out? To me it will remain Boltwood Park.

Anyway, the park and field house were the community center of our old neighborhood. As I remember it, the building was red brick with faux gothic touches like you see on public buildings and schools built around the 30’s and 40’s. The gym was on the first floor, and if you went up to the second floor you could look down on the gymnasium from balconies, and this was the vantage where my mother first spotted my father.

As my mother tells the story, and she was always more than forthcoming in regards to her sex life in most instances (more on that later), she was watching the action below. The air was dry and hot, the lights too bright, which made her feel dizzy. And then there was the squeak,