Enduv Road

3. Que Sera Sera

Chapter 3

Que Sera Sera

It took us fifty years to drive to Utah, or at least that's how it seemed. Moses got across the desert faster. He should have been driving.

Part of the trip was good. We stopped at a place called Stuckey's where my dad allowed us to buy caramel corn. I practically inhaled mine, but Lefty got his stuck all over his socks, so he was able to pick off pieces and eat them all the way to Utah. We had barely left Buffalo when Beaners announced that we must be getting close because she could see the mountains. It was actually a hill of bulldozed dirt behind the Howard Johnson's road stop, but my dad just shook his head and humored her.

Dad drove the entire way because Uncle Arty was a menace on the road, and he had a rotund stomach that made it difficult for him to fit behind the wheel without wheezing. Dad was a better driver with one and a half hands than Arty was with all limbs attached. Uncle Arty never said much, although when he did, he was a hoot. He was clever at mimicking owls and other birds, and he often made pronouncements such as, “I prefer to arrange things alphabetically from one to ten,” or “Lefty, you look like you combed your hair with French fries.”

When riding in the back, Beaners always felt carsick, so Arty had to sit in the backseat with Lefty and me. He had a persistent gas problem that made the trip seem even longer. We had long ago named him “Chuck Yeager” because his gas expulsion could break the sound barrier. His satisfied expression after releasing a doozy was a sight to behold. Dad always said that in those moments, Arty looked like he was crossing the Rubicon. I didn't know what the Rubicon was, but as far as I was concerned, he needed to get from here to there a heck of a lot faster before we all lost consciousness.

We hit a lot of snowstorms along the way, which required slow speeds and a few stops to put chains on the tires. The weather slowed us down a lot, so to make the time on the road pass faster, we played games. Car games for us always included learning activities. Beaners would pull different herbs out of her bag and ask us to try to identify them and say what their purpose was. “Here, taste this,” she said, thrusting something crusty at me.

“Aw, Beaners, I don't want to. That thing looks like the callus you scraped off your foot last month.”

“Go ahead. Chew it. Com'on, Cinnamon Bun.” (She had a penchant for referring to us kids as various pastries.)

As soon as I chewed the bark-like substance, my happy mouth thanked me. “It tastes like root beer!”

“That's right! It’s actually sassafras bark. You can make sassafras tea or sassafras cola with the roots. Guess what else it's good for—colds and diarrhea! I'll make you some when we get to Utah.”

“I want to try the cola but not the diarrhea part,” Lefty warned as he tentatively tried his own sample. “Yum! I would sit on the toilet for this!” he grinned. (Even though my little brother could sometimes be annoying, I thought he was the cutest kid on the planet.)

“You kids have got to learn to appreciate the world around you,” Beaners smiled. “You're going to have that chance when we get to Utah. Who knows, we might even see some real cowboys. Now, who wants to sample willow bark? It's what I use to treat your Uncle Arty's arthritis,” she said as she reached into the backseat and shoved a hunk of bark into his mouth. He groaned but dutifully began to chew. I liked how she took such good care of him.

Our entire trip was a lesson in natural medicine mixed with word games. Dad liked to play “fill in the blank.” The idea was to make up a sentence and leave a word out. Everybody then had to guess the missing word with only a one-letter hint. Sometimes it was informative, and other times the answers were hilarious, like the time Uncle Arty thought the missing word in ‘The cowboy learned to bust a blank’ (fill in the blank—cue letter 'b') was “The cowboy learned to bust a boil.”

“Bronco!” we all howled in unison while Arty laughed so hard he once again crossed over the Rubicon. “I wasn't wrong—I just didn't get the right answer,” he said, which got us all laughing again.

By the time we pulled into Howard Johnson to spend the night and sample one of their 21 Flavors of ice cream, no Buffalo Nazis were on our tail, and I was developing a hopeful attitude about my future.

* * *

On our long car drive across the country, I had time to think about a lot of things most twelve-year-olds don't have time to ponder. I can't say that I missed Maple Street where I was born. To me, Endicott was dismal and brown, but it was my home. Our town was the home of E-J shoes, and therefore many of the locals worked in the same shoe factory where Dad had worked or at IBM, which was located in nearby Binghamton.

There were also lots of Mafia types, although in my neighborhood, the Mafia was referred to as La Costa Nostra or simply “the mob.” Many of the dads who were connected to the Mafia didn't have regular jobs like my dad. Instead, they would hang out on the street corner by the tavern and play cards or roll dice—when they weren't in jail, that is. The “Mafiosi,” as we knew them, were always very nice to us kids and sometimes offered us spiedies--a delicious, marinated-meat sandwich they cooked up on charcoal grills right out on the sidewalk.

We always felt safe because everyone said folks outside our neighborhood were aware of who actually policed the area and knew it was best not to make trouble. Most of the men were very jolly and well-dressed. Once in a while we got word that somebody's dad was missing, but as a kid, I just thought he took a wrong turn on the way home. In 1957, I learned the truth.

Endicott was just a few miles from the town of Apalachin, a town that became famous during the autumn of 1957 for the largest Mafia bust ever. My dad and I watched the news as David Brinkley announced on NBC that there had been a raid during their historic summit at the home of a mobster named Joseph Barbera, also known as “Joe the Barber.” The news report detailed how mob bosses from all over the United States, Cuba, and even as far away as Italy had attended. Many were captured and taken into custody.

The details we got from my classmate made the entire incident extra exciting. Donna confided that her dad, who suspiciously knew many of the Apalachin attendees, complained that they had scattered “like rats in a sewer.” According to him, the panicked men ran through the woods to escape capture. Some were found hiding out on nearby porches. Donna’s uncle was one of the Mafiosi caught cowering in a fruit cellar. Donna maintained that her family had no idea why her uncle was in the area at the time of the raid. (My dad harrumphed when he heard that.) She theorized that he must've just gotten lost on his way to pick up a pack of Chesterfields.

After the newscast, we all had a good time naming Mafiosi we had seen around Endicott. We dubbed Tony Tartaglia “Tony Two-Fingers Tartaglia” because he always held his fingers like a pistol. We then dubbed Donna's dad “Frankie Figure-It-Out-Already Fiorelli” because he always seemed confused. Lefty came up with the best one when he nicknamed our neighbor, Tom Testa, “Tommy Two-Shoes Testa” because he once saw him wearing two right shoes. It didn't matter if my brother just imagined it due to his own shoe challenges, because we all laughed in delight.

Although I missed Endicott, there was nothing in the world I missed as much as my mother. I loved Beaners and Arty, but I wished we were still in Endicott and my mom was still alive. My mother got sick shortly after Lefty was born, and she slowly began to fade away. When I thought about her each night before I fell asleep, I remembered how she brushed my hair and sang to me or read us stories if she had the strength.

My mother loved books. She once told me she had named me Cimarron after her favorite book by an author named Edna Ferber. She said she loved the name and knew I would become a strong and independent woman like the lead character in the novel. “One day, you will achieve your manifest destiny. No matter where I am, I'll always be looking out for you, my sweet little Simmy, so don't you ever forget that.”

When she got really sick, I would go outside and take long walks along the railroad tracks, even though the inhabitants of the abandoned train cars sometimes scared me. Although they were referred to as “bums,” some of them were clean and neatly dressed as though just passing through. They jumped on and off the trains in broad daylight as if it were a perfectly normal way to travel.

To earn extra money to buy presents to lift my mom's spirits, I worked a paper route. Each day, I took a shortcut across the railroad tracks behind the E-J factory on Maple Street and cut through the field to the paper drop at the corner of Page Avenue and Dickson Street. Early one morning, as I crossed the tracks, a vagrant pushed me up against a rail car and demanded that I give him all my money. I emptied my pockets and ran home in hysterics.

I was so terrified that I screamed for my father and told him I had been held up “at gunpoint.” (Okay, so maybe there was no g*n involved except in my imagination—but there could have been.) “He burglarized me and made me wet my pants,” I cried. (Unfortunately, that part was true.) After Dad ran down to the train tracks and threatened the thief, he returned with my paper route earnings. My father assured me that the bum also wet his pants, so I shouldn’t be ashamed of my bladder mishaps.

After the robbery incident, Mom said it was time for me to retire from the newspaper business, so I began making potholders with a potholder weaving kit and went door-to-door trying to sell my handmade wares.

By the time my mom died, I had a large stash of unsold potholders, but for some reason, I just kept making extra. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Dad said I needed to talk more about Mom, which was something I really couldn't do. I had started losing my mother before she died, so I was angry that I hadn’t really had a mom for a long time. And it hurt too much to talk about her. She was so sweet and kind, but she was like a shadow in our own house.

For long periods, my mother was hospitalized at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, and after she came home, she had to stay in her room alone. We couldn't go in because she had something called “sepsis.” I didn't want her to be lonely, so I would stand outside her bedroom door and sing to her. She really liked that a lot and often whispered, “You are my sweet Simmy angel.”

One day, as I was singing “Que Sera Sera,” my mom's favorite Doris Day song, I heard her quietly join in. I could tell she had moved closer to her door, so I lay down on the floor and pressed my face up to the gap at the bottom of the door. After I finished my song, there was a long silence, and then Mom began to whisper-sing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” Although the words were clear, her beautiful voice slowly became fainter and fainter until it fell silent.

In an absolute panic, I tried to push the door open, but something was blocking it. “Don't leave me, Mommy,” I screamed into the nothingness. “Let's sing again.” I was so desperate that I sang wildly, pressing my face against the door until it hurt while making loud sounds that no longer sounded like melodies. I kept singing until my throat closed up and my body went into involuntary contractions.

When Dad came in from the garage, he found me on the floor and tried to push open their bedroom door. Somehow, he knew my mom was gone. Dad picked me up and kissed me all over my wet face. His body was trembling, and I heard him cry out, “No! No!” as he made moaning sounds like a wounded animal.

The night Mom died, I began wetting the bed again periodically, even though I had managed to stop almost two years earlier. Dad explained that her death is what made me have a nervous bladder and that I should never apologize for the way a person's body chooses to mourn.

The week she died, Dad sent us swimming every day to keep us busy while he made what he called “final arrangements.” It felt wrong to me, but my father insisted that water is healing and that it would make Mom very happy to know we were not losing any time living because every minute is precious and brief.

In my hometown, there was a big public pool where we loved to swim every summer. En-Joie Park (everything in the area was Endicott – Johnson related) was a very long walk, but the cool water was a satisfying reward. Some of the older kids terrorized us at the pool by holding our heads under the water, although they had to be careful about whom they messed with. If Mr. Fiorelli heard about it, he would spread the word that all punks should get ready to “make friends with Jesus,” thereby discouraging bullies for at least a week or two.

Summers at the park always ended with a spectacular display of fireworks, a highlight we looked forward to every year. The event usually drew a large crowd, and we all would spread blankets on the hillside behind the pool so we could lie down and look up at the late summer sky as it exploded with light. As part of the grand finale, there was always a fireworks display in the shape and colors of the American flag, during which we all stood to sing the national anthem. At the end of the summer that Mom died, we didn't go. Dad said he could never imagine the sky being bright again.

We hadn't yet spent a summer in Buffalo, where I was looking forward to endless days of swimming at the local pool that had a giant fountain in the middle. Beaners said we could get there by riding our bikes. Uncle Arty said we could also get there by “riding our feet.” By any means of transportation, that pool was a dream that no longer existed because now we were driving cross-country to some strange place where none of us had ever been, and where I did not want to go.

As I sat in the car thinking of what was behind me, I had no idea what was in front of me. Then suddenly, we all saw the sign: “Welcome to Utah.” Everyone cheered and whooped, and Lefty got so excited he swallowed his bubble gum.

There was something magical about that sign. It greeted us out loud. However, even the mentally deficient, overly vocal Ouija board that guided Aunt Beaners could not have predicted what surprises we were about to encounter.