Up the Downside: A Memoir

By Maureen Wallner

In the thick of French separatist revolutionaries aimed at blowing her Quebec off Canada, seventeen, I was the not-so-good girl anymore from an embattled family in live-for-today, Beatles infested 1967. What a time to bump into a die-hard American from New York with a passion to be a doctor. But without t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maureen Wallner
• Release date: Feb 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798988587101

Maureen Wallner

A Canadian-American from French-English Montréal, Québec, Canada. As an adult, a Phi Beta Kappa, Magna cum laude graduate from Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, with a bachelor's degree in English literature. a minor in journalism. She has three grown children and lives in Moline, Illinois with her husband, a retired cardiologist, plus their two canine advisors. I am currently writing the historical fiction novel: "Free."

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Up the Downside

This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

Copyright © 2023 by Maureen Wallner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

First paperback edition March 2024

Edited by Brooks Becker

Cover Design by Lynn Andreossi

Interior design by Veronica Scott

ISBN 979-8-9885871-1-8 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-9885871-0-1 (ebook)

LLC 2023911148

meetmaureen.website

Dedicated to anyone

who says, I can’t.

To whom I would say,

Why not?

Contents

Prologue

A Clipped-on Smile

Deli and a Leprechaun

For What It’s Worth

Child Bride

It Happened in Greenwich

Move Over Nancy Drew

Aulstublieft

Break Your Mother’s Back

Not so Fast

Bad Child

Bathtub in the Kitchen

Ghosts

Sandwiched

War in Peace

Lost and Found

Stuff of Dreams

Three Steps to Books and Bones

In Sheep’s Clothing

I Take You

Mother May I

The Girl

A Bicycle, Flowers, and Never Mind

Forward with the Goat?

Inner Sanctum

But It Pours

Everybody Must Get Stoned

The Scruffy Underside

Blood Sisters Forever

A Big Deal

To Keep

Oversexed

Around a Corner

Cracked

The Bottom Line

Broken

In the Eyes

When You Gotta Go

I Never Lie

Best Laid Plans

Not Good Enough

What Time Forgot

Hey, Look at Me

Dreams of Things That Never Were

All That Glitters

Pass or Fail

Haves and Have Nots

At a Price

Hand of Fate

One

When They Stop Bringing You Joy

A Break, Not Broken

Square Peg in a Round Hole

Young and Fun

Where There’s Hope, There’s Life

Statistics Returned

In the Mirror

Pursuit of Happiness

One Step Forward. Two Steps Back

My Baby and Me

Always Something

Make a Wish

Fairy Tales

Secrets

Where Happy Was Supposed to Be

If Wishes Were Horses

Maybe Let’s Drink to That

Calm Before the Storm

What Caught the Sun

The Yellow Banana

So Far, Too Near

The Other Dream

All Systems Go

Tot Ziens

The Hora Dance

Thirty-five-Hundred Miles

Here

Touch Down

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Prologue

You look in a mirror, not seeing who you are.

Now here is someone who believes in you. Sees you as special. Wants you to be happy. More than anything. Someone with a dream to follow.

And a glimmer grows into passion.

What must be done displaces expectations.

Days peel away. The room fills with, look at me. This is who I am.

Who knew a person could also fall in love with words?

Touching Ground

Nineteen and twenty-one,

Vietnam breathing at our backs.

Drizzled footsteps

lined up like soldiers

to the beat of pass or fail.

Tears inside

watching rigid faces.

Cobblestones

straight ahead, tout droit

to a park, blank statue eyes,

old branches bending

under a flaked grey sky.

On a stone wall

with apples and dogs,

Canada and USA.

1

New York, September 1969

A Clipped-on Smile

Buckled into a Pan Am, rolling eyes and his droopy lip above me, Frog, my size head to middle, slumps beside my ironclad not so portable sewing machine. Parked at Kennedy a brush away from sunset, we are escapees from the hellish heat this crazy fall. Not nearly as popular as blue-eyed Neil Armstrong, on the moon, with his giant leap for mankind. No Jimi Hendrix, wrapped in a red bandana, his guitar twang-singing Star Spangled Banner in a farmer’s field sprouting naked bodies squatting in mud and rain, swathed in love, skin painted, flowing beads.

Soon. Wimpy air from the overhead funnels down my thick white turtleneck that’s supposed to be for the Belgium damp. Our steamer trunks cast adrift across the ocean will probably never reach us. We’re going where Harry’s somber mother and her husband, with a wife and brother hid a sniff away from Nazis. Walked there from their Berlin.

Now here is her zun beside me, sleeping at a time like this. No gushy runny egg feeling, turning his gut upside down. His long legs outstretched, with that sweaty clump of dark hair drooping toward his eyes, he’s probably on his dreamy way to Mexico in the family Olds flat as a duck’s beak, meandering toward shadowed hills. I’d ask him in a letter. But married now, we don’t need to anymore, that lifeline cut like my Canada, abandoned for my mother’s United States, which makes up only half of me.

So much to take along on our way to Harry’s dream as I imagine our student loan shattering like a dried-up rubber band, and Harry’s eyes open, clip to mine. Our hands touch, warm. I add a smile, so good at pretending I’m okay when I’m not. Headed out to nowhere.

***

2

St. Laurent, June 1967

Deli and a Leprechaun

Wedged in the corner of a booth, I squinted at faces, nodding, jabbering. A nice, near-sighted Jewish girl, with eyes of no particular colour, boyfriendless and seventeen. As unfull of love as I possibly could be. Stuck in a mind-altering summer of love with cap-haired Beatles wanting to hold your hand, and long-haired hippies, bra-less girls, singing, Sha la, la, la, la, la, live for today. Free-spirited bodies streaked naked through the streets. Somewhere.

But not in my Quebec. In Ville St. Laurent, a city in a city that used to be a parish with its streetcars, then its buses. In my Montreal. An island. An appropriate location for a person such as me.

Though this deli had its place with its pinkish tubes of kosher pink salamis dangling over the front counter. On the sideboard, doughy, onion potato knishes piled high beside slabs of blackened smoked meat waited to be sliced for rosy, spiced fatty mile-high sandwiches on teeny white, crispy-edged rye bread circles, dripping in thick yellow mustard. There was really nothing like them. If you had an appetite.

But I only wanted to disappear.

This was all Dyan’s idea, her black-outliner eyes popping on, Come on. Let’s go, this nothing-doing Saturday night, done strolling to the mall, hanging out, teasing and flirting with our friends. Since her cross-her-heart-hope-to-die promise not to tell that had them done with me.

Everyone but her, I thought, plucking another limp greasy fry, taking a bite, and chewing. Waiting for a new crop of pimples to erupt around my nose. Now, crunch-churning my straw through my ice-cubed Coke with Peter in my mind, thigh to thigh, zoning out, beating the funky rhythm from his head onto the swirled green tabletop as if he was tapping at his drums in his basement band. My high school dropout, ex-bike thief ex-boyfriend, who had a thing for saying, I’m no good for you. I’ll only hurt you, just after a heart-throbbing kiss. Who went on to prove it after I had fallen flat on my face in cliché love with him.

If I were smarter, I’d forget him.

Ian too, my cap-haired albatross, his singer cousin, who was now stuffed beside me with a feel of grabby spiderwebs. Who had knocked on my door after Peter and I broke up. When he tried to doggie paddle across my chest. And I threw him out.

Bummer he wouldn’t disappear.

And now Dyan’s lips were pursed around Linc, stale as a cigarette smoke ring. With the sound of a rusted chain. Her new boyfriend.

Like us. Sort of friends since my father sold the house on Bertrand Street that my mother gutted like a fish. Our Monopoly apartments sat side by side on Laurentian Boulevard. That summer, side by side, we dangled our feet in icy water at the dinky swimming pool my father touted as something special. I had two inches on her height, but my two-piece bathing suit, hanging like emptied sausage casings, could never measure up to her Jayne Mansfield boobs. That was our auspicious beginning, basted in iodine-laced baby oil, St. Laurent, Quebec beside Chatham, Ontario exchanging, My parents are divorced to mournful twangs of her freckle-faced brother, Joey’s, twanging bass guitar. I just didn’t quite know what to do with, "My father is an Indian. My mother’s French Canadian."

But Linc was from the States. Connecticut. An American. Much more enticing than our guys. That’s how it worked from opposite sides of the border. My pretty Syracuse-born mother, Betty Ruth Gottschalk, and her charmer, Donald Brown, from Montreal, bumped into each other on vacation in Plattsburgh, New York. With absolutely no sense of humor, she laughed at all his corny jokes. Then they got married, and my carefree brother happened. Introspective me. Named for dead people. It’s bad luck for a Jew to get a live person’s name. Chuck for her brave, curly-haired father who had crawled on his belly under barbed wire, dismantling bombs in World War I. With a sex change, I favoured her dear Uncle Maurice who, with his aura of otherness, no shape or face, fluttered her curtain visiting her bedroom on Bertrand Street. And there we were. A dead somebody and an uncle ghost.

Something else to fold and refold into neat triangles, patted down into my paper napkin with another glance, as if I was listening, to Dyan, her smooth bleach blonde hair tipping her high cheekbones toward her Barbra Streisand nose.

Though she can’t sing and she’s Catholic, I said to myself.

He’s coming up, Dyan continued.

Who? Linc, I tossed back.

"No. Harry. His friend."

That again.

We met at Expo. With Leah.

A nod for that pasted into chestnut wavy hair. Buoyant. From down the block…onto Chuck and a few kissy months until maybe her effervescence wore him out.

But, Expo, the World’s Fair, Man and His World. That we had so many names for, fluffing up our newspapers with Attendance to Capacity. With its multi-coloured world flags rippling by a giant globe Biosphere. We had two bridges to get us to its island created for our prize. A new one and our old rickety Jacques Cartier, named for the French explorer who took a wrong turn on his way to Asia, up the St. Lawrence River to our place. Lester Pearson, our Prime Minister, puffy-cheeked with a ski slope nose, lit the torch on Olympic-style opening day. Our Mayeur Jean Drapeau, a Sherman lookalike from Rocky and Bullwinkle in thick-framed glasses but without the hair, insisted it would pull our English and French together. Like, Come on, people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another, right now. Expo would be good for us. Like my mother’s dry, tasteless broiled beef liver. He had grabbed up the fair from Russia, about to plug it into their fiftieth anniversary of Revolution.

We already had one for as long as I could remember. We called it quiet, our French separatists turning English mailboxes into flying missiles on their way to hacking Quebec off Canada. Québec if you were French with that é accent egu, hard A sound with a gugh.

Though we hadn’t been quiet for over 300 years. Since Iroquois called their village, Kanata. When Cartier, looking for gold, rearranged it as New France. Then the English won it over to plug it in as part of their Commonwealth. History class. Third grade. Along with pursing our lips stumbling through French plays for an hour a day from Miss Taylor in her long, artichoke-green dress that skimmed her skinny thighs. That was called learning French in our Protestant public school that Jews joined in on at a hefty tax, my father complained. Where a New Testament brought us mumbling through the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want and we streamed angel hair, silvery tinsel and teeny glass balls on Christmas trees. Sang carols, skipping the word Jesus. Busy, busy.

But my father had only ever kept track of who did what to whom — French against the English — from his overstuffed armchair, in our living room, on Bertrand Street. Huffing, puffing, throwing his paper down, red-faced yelling, I wouldn’t give two cents for any of ‘em.

Course not. He wouldn’t give two cents to anybody.

And now Dyan had popped up, dashing to the door to return glowing like the Expo flame with, "This is Harry. We call him Chief."

The tall, bearded, broad-shouldered guy with tortoiseshell aviation glasses over piercing, earthy eyes that seemed to say, so what about everyone around him? Including no big deal me who, according to my mother, was not supposed to be there. My father never wanted children. So I didn’t actually exist.

Not like Dyan, cheerleading, Hey, let’s go up to Sainte Agathe and catch Neil Sedaka? I hear he’s making a comeback. Was she serious? Drive over an hour to see a has-been. But what else was there to do? Her lips compressed waiting, her saucer brown orbs stared us down with the spitfire of her petite, dyed-red-hair maman.

Out slid pesky Ian, following her and Harry out the door where I paused, my eyes snagged on my new in clingy hip-hugger bell-bottom cords. Finished with my fifty cents an hour babysitting for clothes, stroking what I bought on layaway with my new money from my job.

I took that glow outside, bumping into oohs and aahs clustered around Harry’s Mustang, an impressive midnight blue with its white vinyl roof. That Dyan whisked into, upfront, in the bucket seat. Leaving me behind again with irritating Ian.

Then Harry’s tires squealed, spinning off for that spit of a French town tucked into the Laurentian Mountains. Swerving in the dark, along narrow roads and curves, with a final hook, breaks rammed, gravel spitting, he landed in front of a bar, its yellow-gold-blue Molson’s beer sign flashing. Out some jumped. The rest of us unfolded from the rear.

Like a dealt deck of cards, we scattered around a table at the lip of a stage, on it a leprechaun of a man, in green, on a unicycle, juggling small blue rubber balls. Then out sprang Neil Sedaka in his black hair dye job, looking so middle-aged, warbling, I love you, love you, love you, sweet calendar girl. Then, Haaap-py Birthday sweet sixteen slipping me back to mine on Peter’s lap, on our saggy tweed couch, his present in my hands. Silky pink pajamas for the not-so-good girl since our afternoon in my rumpled bed put an end to his, If you love me, you will dilemma.

Something to swallow down with my watery Seven Up, taking potshot glances at Harry/Chief, dragging on his Scotch. No ice. Eyes only on the stage. His mind probably on Leah.

***

3

St. Laurent, June 1967

For What It’s Worth

My world was limited. No space in it for more than me in my two boxes.

One box was my room. On my bed. Teepee legs folded, collecting thoughts. Outside, people fluttering around like birds alighting, pecking, flitting off again, not expected to stay.

Not Chuck, basking in cinnamon-haired Margaret, from the second floor, with her enticing British flavor. Or carving out his nights at Loyola University from toppled post-divorce high school grades. Days drawing pictures of tubes and wires at an amplifier place. Not my father calling in his, How are you? for my, Fine between jogging and pumping iron, losing his belly fat. He had found déjà vu Ruth to marry. A matching bookkeeper. A recap from his office party when I was four, clutching my straw monkey purse, in frilly ankle socks, my patent leather shoe heels digging into the chair bottom. Her crimson lips had bent in a witchy smile into my startled face, a square of chocolate in her fingertips like Snow White’s poisoned apple. My mother had found a job helping pedantic Anna bookkeep at a hardware store. Then, Alex, a blind date from a pineapple drink Polynesian restaurant. Thick eyeglasses and a thicker German-Israeli accent, his apartment around our corner, he kept steady eyes on her as she reminded him, You’re too young for me, her forty years against his twenty-eight.

I, of course, maintained my seventeen-year-old solidarity in my bedroom, its window covered over in a tatty pull-down shade that hovered like a droopy eyelid. Chair-sized Frog crouched in his corner, cross-eyed, so very green. Chuck’s lugged home exchange from Atlantic City where he lost my transistor radio on a beach. There I mused under my shelf, bunched in Alex’s emptied pastel wine bottles that I imagined catching rainbows. My back against foam pillows, on my washed-out bedspread, I scribbled love songs in shorthand code. All the words to Up, up and away, my beautiful balloon and Paul Simon’s, I am a Rock. He was an island, same as me with my books and poetry. Metaphors, my old friends, shared my pen, turned knife, brush, clay that cut, coloured, and comforted as a sun-speckled blanket over me.

Now big, bearded Harry had nudged my world. A silent charmer visitor from the deli. An enigma who was nothing like my talkative brother with laughing eyes. Nor my father, a simmering volcano. Calm, private, distanced, he had stared out his window on our drive back to St. Laurent when, leaving him to his thoughts, Ian faded into the seat beside me and Peter dimmed a bit. I didn’t know I should have compared Harry to an ocean lapping foamy at a sandy shore or a sailboat rocking.

Then I filed him down, like one of my letters into an office folder, according to my swaying mood.

That was the other box. My nine-to-five job existence. Diverted from home dramas. Complying with my mother’s to get us by, and my father’s You’ll need to get a job, his beady eyes clear on, What else could you possibly do?

I suppose. I didn’t need my merit badge. Big Sir Winston Churchill W sewn on my high school sweater pocket for scoring over 80 percent in eighth grade. With a goodbye peek at Shari and Lois, flaxen and frothy, in the hallway, from the Latin stream aimed at college, I was off to Commercial, typing faster and faster, Sanskrit shorthand squiggles, and never-to-balance sheets. Plagued by number columns that never added up.

Seated into my six years of life, that blossomed on my father’s knees where, telling time — despite my sparkling Cinderella watch strapped to my wrist in her blue-white ball gown — innocuous 2s and 6s, 9s and 3s refused to comply with his instructions, raining down on me like the cards on to poor toppled Alice in Wonderland, who was not at all Cinderella. Then my father’s face, mad as the Red Queen’s, turned crimson, booming, Stupid! His coal eyes sent me sliding down his convulsing legs, aimed for my bedroom closet to cocoon myself in cotton dresses, my lesson ended as, no laughing at the table buckled into meal time, until Chuck’s twinkly eyes, a smirk, tested our bonds.

Could be that made a good fit for sixteen and, done with high school, parked at Brother International behind a fake wood desk in front of a turquoise curtain we never opened. Since surviving Mr. Kalker’s take a letter, my secretarial fingers riding Olympia typewriter keys, producing the written word on to grease-black lowercase brother letterhead, my Dictaphone to one side, shorthand pad on the other. Behind me a Telex, churning out dot code streams of paper tape orders from Nagoya, Japan.

There I was in a mix of jittery, gregarious, somber, and authoritarian, directed by sometimes almost funny Mr. Kalker, a bulbous nose, blondish, slouchy, imported from Brooklyn. Thirty-something Barry, in his squeezed-into dress shirt, generally managed things. With his excuse-me smile, cigarette smoke streamed from his lips. He also picked me up from home to be there. Then returned me each day. Up front, behind a glass partition, her dark hair in a swept-up bun, shy, chubby Aisha, from Iraq, fielded English and French. Suited up, in our showroom, in grey and blue, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Anderson sang out the amazing features of our whirring and saw-like sewing and knitting machines. Craggy Mrs. J.’s clackety-clack adding machine permeated outer office. At the end of every week, I tore off half my fifty dollars for my mother to get us by.

Mrs. J.’s vulture eyes were pinned on me when Dyan called.

Hey, whatcha think about coming with me to New York?

Why?

You could be Harry’s blind date!

He probably doesn’t know I’m alive.

C’mon. My mother won’t let me go alone. It’s just a weekend.

To shoot ‘em up, eight million stories Naked City?

So who’d we be with, anyway?

My father. At his hotel. There on business.

Hm. A notch above my own Tuesday court-ordered Father visits.

So?

I’ll ask. I guess.

***

Tonight, I sighed. I promise, I told Dyan after two weeks of did you and another mail strike with our angry separatists ramming, Propagande par le fait! A sentiment as dear to my mother’s heart as her, Actions speak louder than words. Though our French were referring to being cheated out of their birth language and heritage. She was more about my lying, cheating father.

But I had my question. And that put us in the living room after another helping of dried reheated chicken. On our saggy couch, fluffy Domino at my feet, my mother sat across from me, in the red vinyl high back chair with its corner rip, knitting, purling to planes’ hell-bent scrambling, I Love Lucy making scrunched faces at Ethel on our rabbit ears-topped TV.

As good a time as any to push out, Dyan wants me to go with her to New York.

For a weekend, I added, pausing my mother’s needles.

When? she stabbed, looking up.

In about a week. She doesn’t want to go alone to see her boyfriend.

Eyebrows lifted.

I’ll be with…Harry.

Enough details. Though we did have our gap to fill. What will you use for money?

My Income Tax return, I supplied to her obvious surprise.

It’s mine, I added. Then, We’ll be with Dyan’s father."

My mother drove her needle deep through men not to be trusted, my father in particular.

Her Okay landed at my feet to trail back to my room with Domino who collapsed beside my bed with a thunk of her aged bones.

But that wasn’t always. We had a moment when she was smacked on the rump by my father’s newspaper as bad dog for carsick throwing up on his back seat bringing her home. Our mysterious rescue though he had no room in his heart for dogs. With her French name and German shepherd face on a collie body. She needed a kiss on her soft fuzzy snout, saying to her, It’ll be okay, her deep trusting mocha eyes melting into mine. When she was two and I was six, head to head in love that was not at all like these days of, Who do you love more?

Now I had my okay from my I never had a mother mother forever given away in Syracuse. Who,