ALONG COMES MARY
Title of a song by the Association
A Story of Pittsburgh
By Leslie Golding Mastroianni
I am an “afterthought,” also known as a “change of life baby.” My mother always says that she thought her “insides had a sign on them that said ‘We’re closed. Everything must go. But every time your father hung his hat on the bedpost, I got pregnant.” So, just like the song says, the one by The Association, Along Comes Mary.
That’s me; I’m Mary Darschak. Dry little Mary. I live in a small house that’s stuffed with big people. My father and two older brothers are big. So are my mother and older sister. My mother likes to kid around and say that because I’m the afterthought, “God didn’t have enough spit and rubber bands left over to make a regular-sized Darschak.” I’m not just small, though; I’m dry in a family full of wet people. My father and brothers drink lots of beer on the weekends, and they spit when they’re talking to you. My mother and sister are wet, too. They don’t drink beer, but they also spit when they’re talking, and they talk all the time, it seems. They are noisy and I’m quiet.
I share a bedroom with my older sister. She has three quarters of the room and I have to be content with what’s left. This doesn’t bother me, though. What do I need room for, when all I have is my narrow bed, small chest of drawers, and one bookshelf? Delsey, my sister, goes out on dates so she needs room for a “dressing table” and her huge hair dryer. You would think that a big girl with the name Delsey Darschak would be an outcast, but that’s not the way it is with my sister. Boys run after her all the time, and she has lots of girlfriends, too.
Why do I say that I’m dry? My hair, the color of Cheerios, is dry, just like the cereal. My face is square and plain and my skin is dry, too. I don’t spit when I talk. I don’t talk very much to begin with, but when I do, I look down or up.
In elementary school, my grades were all Cs. I wasn’t good at anything. When I left elementary school and entered Swissvale High School, things changed a little. I was still dry and little and quiet, but I was taking Home Economics, which included sewing. From the first day, it was as if my fingers understood things about sewing before my brain did. Lots of girls were afraid of using the sewing machine, but not me. The teacher told me that I had golden hands. It was in part because of the smallness of my hands that I’m deft when threading a needle or sewing a straight seam. Very soon, other girls were asking me for help with their sewing projects.
I remained little and quiet and dry, though. My modest success with sewing didn’t change me very much, and I was sure by this time that nothing would ever change me. But then a group of eighth graders, me included, went on a field trip to Oakland, the part of Pittsburgh where the Cathedral of Learning is. We were going to see the “library and natural history museum complex,” as our homeroom teacher described it.
Nobody I knew had ever gone there. Certainly, nobody in my family had. When I asked my father to sign the permission form that would enable me to take this trip, he grumbled uneasily. Why did we have to go all the way down into Oakland for a field trip? There were lots of things that eighth graders could find to do right here in Swissvale. With one eye on the football game that was blaring away on the television, my father gave in and scribbled his name on the signature line. Such is the way fate works. If there hadn’t been a football game on television that evening that my father wanted desperately to watch “in peace” (ha ha!—the volume, turned up to the max, shook the house), he may have decided that little Mary didn’t need to go to the library and museum complex and refused to sign. My whole life would have been different.
The natural history museum, with its life-sized dinosaur skeletons, scared me. They keep the skeletons in a dark, high-ceilinged room with only spotlights trained on them; the effect is chilling, like a monster movie, and I looked away until we left the room. My classmates behaved “atrociously” on this trip, according to our harassed homeroom teacher, the boys throwing chewing gum papers and spitballs, the girls giggling and talking louder than the museum guide who tried to make the dinosaurs interesting. That was when I had my first vision of the day, in the dinosaur room.
In this vision, I saw my classmates, boys and girls both, growing up, getting married to each other, the girls working in the dairy store or Woolworth’s, the boys all going to work at the steel mills the day after high school graduation. It didn’t make a difference who married who; one was no different than the rest. They could pair up, boy and girl, then another boy and girl, interchangeably. After the pairing up came work, children, retirement, death. But my vision didn’t include me.
I stood apart from them, me alone. What I was doing alone, apart from my peers, was unclear in that fraction of a second. I began to shake and I thought I was ill. Then we walked down the marble-floored corridor that connects the museum with the library, my classmates calling out and creating echoes as they stamped their feet.
I believed I was very ill indeed the first time I saw the adult reading rooms and checkout desks in the library that day; either I was ill or going insane in some horrible way. I had never seen so many books. I didn’t know that there were that many books in the world. One of the librarians, the head librarian, tall and dark-haired with the impressive name of Mrs. Artemis, took command of the situation. She told our group in a mild, soft voice that she demanded the group be quiet at once because—and I quote—“Great minds are at work here, ladies and gentlemen, and for that I require absolute silence.” My classmates heeded Mrs. Artemis at once; the group became as quiet as if they were in church. Thereupon followed my second vision.
Everything in the library shone with a blinding heavenly light. I waited for the dove-shaped Holy Spirit to descend upon us all. The brass handles on the card catalogue drawers, Mrs. Artemis’ glasses, the floors, all of it gleamed and I closed my eyes, sure now that something was very wrong with me. I tried opening my eyes after some seconds passed, and this time my eyes adjusted to what they saw. Books and more books, not scattered or jammed or piled any which way onto shelves, but in order. Mrs. Artemis spoke to us about the Dewey Decimal system and showed us a big poster that listed the categories within the system. I was bursting to know more; why did Dewey categorize the books in that way? Why did he think of doing it in the first place? Did the alphabet play a part in making categories for books? Being little quiet Mary, I did not have the courage to ask these questions that day, but something got settled within me at that time, something rock-hard and reliable. I had found my place. I knew where I belonged.
I sat by myself in one of the last seats on the bus on the way back to Swissvale High School. Mrs. Artemis had given everybody a bookmark listing the numbers of the Dewey Decimal system. My classmates made spitballs out of the cardboard bookmarks and threw them at each other and at the back of the bus driver’s head, our teacher too exhausted to protest and intervene. But I sat looking at the bookmark and stroking its surface with my index finger. By the time we arrived back at Swissvale, I had memorized the main categories of the Dewey Decimal system.
* * * * * *
Because my family is Catholic, as was every family I knew then, I was sent to religious school and so I knew all about visions. You had to have faith to believe that these things were true. It had been pounded into our heads, the existence and truth of visions. One handy thing about visions is that things, the circumstances of your life, become clarified. It is as if light has been shed in darkness. I couldn’t deny the fact that I had been struck dumb in the library, like Paul on the road to Damascus, upon seeing the immense card catalogues and the marble stairs and Mrs. Artemis herself, noble Mrs. Artemis who could quiet a classful of noisy, disrespectful 13 year olds in the space of one sentence.
Immediately, my life began to take shape around the twin visions that I had on the field trip. In the first vision, the one in which I saw my classmates paired up interchangeably, I was the only one without a mate. I took that to mean that I would be alone, always, in life. I didn’t mind much; from what I’d seen of boys and men in my 13 years, I hadn’t been impressed. But that awareness made the pursuit of the second vision more intense. I knew that I had to find out what role I could play in the world of the Carnegie Library. They didn’t need people who could sew well, I was pretty sure of that. I hadn’t seen any sewing machines in the library. Then there must be something else I could find out or know in order to be accepted there. I looked around me and began to think. You see, I knew very well indeed what I was up against.
How could I even begin to tell my parents about my newfound knowledge? How could I describe it? The pattern had been set down and I was supposed to follow it as I grew up—school, work, marriage, children, retirement, death. There was no room for the main branch of the Carnegie Library. As far as work went, I knew what my choices were: the Five and Ten, the hardware store, the movie theater, or the dairy store. Just as my classmates paired off with each other interchangeably in my first vision, little difference existed between these choices of employment.
But, wait a minute! I didn’t have to tell anybody about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, did I? I could keep it a secret if I wanted to. This was the real breaking away point. Up until now I had never kept anything secret from my parents. I had nothing to be secretive about up until this point, but now I had fallen in love. Yes, it was love, real love, and I asked myself if it was unnatural to fall in love with a building and the books it housed, and added to that, a queenly librarian. I shrugged my doubts away. It probably was unnatural, but it was too late to worry about that. Now I began to plan, just like an underage girl who schemes with her boyfriend to run away to Elkton, Maryland and get married. I began with the school library, the one in Swissvale High School.
* * * * * * *
Compared to the main branch of the Carnegie Library, this library was pathetic, not even that. It didn’t count; however, there was a school librarian who worked there. She didn’t do anything except tell people to be quiet and stop throwing spitballs. Maybe she was bored, I thought. My first step toward finding a place in the Carnegie Library would be ending her boredom, milking her for all the information she had, and making a plan.
I waited patiently, watching the school librarian until I could tell that she was thoroughly bored. She sat at her old, beat up desk, supporting her chin with one hand, leafing through a magazine. I made my approach.
“Excuse me, Miss Connell,” I said in my best good-little-girl voice. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Well, Mary,” she said sleepily, “Of course, you can ask me a question. What’s on your mind?”
“How did you get to be a librarian?”
Miss Connell’s eyes jerked awake. She stared at me. “What brought this on? Why do you want to know?”
“I want to know because when we went to see the library and museum, I saw some librarians and it made me curious.”
“Curious. Huh. Well, don’t get your hopes up, Mary dear. I had to get a Bachelor’s degree, then a Master’s degree in Library Science. It takes six or seven years. That’s way out of your league. You’re not planning on going to college, are you?” She smiled condescendingly. My heart plummeted, but I kept my dry-little-Mary face intact.
“Well, aren’t there people working there who haven’t gone to college?”
“I guess you’re right. They have offices there and janitors, people who keep the place clean. Is that what you’re driving at?”
“I’m sorry if you think I was driving at anything, Miss Connell. I just got curious. Thank you very much,” I said sweetly.
I was learning fast the value of being dry quiet little Mary. People barely noticed me. My brothers and sister were big and noisy and got noticed, but because of that they were not free. I was free, and freedom tasted good.
I contemplated my parents, and I recalled my father’s reaction to my request that he sign the permission form for the trip to Oakland. Impossible, the idea that I could tell him about my visions, and get him to give me money for bus fare to Oakland in order to investigate these visions further. My mother, I knew, was milder and could be persuaded into more things; she in turn possessed the ability to persuade my father into things. I had overheard plenty of arguments between my sister and my parents; Delsey was always asking if she could do something or go somewhere forbidden, with a boy. My father would yell and bang around a little, but my mother skillfully maneuvered him into submission. I tried her first, deciding to omit the fact that I’d had the visions on the field trip.
“Mom,” I said that same day, after school, “I need to ask you a question.”
“Yeah, hon,” she responded, half listening, her face turned toward the television. Her favorite soap opera was on.
“Can I have bus fare to take the bus into Oakland on Saturday?”
“What?” she asked, turning to me.
I repeated myself.
“What do you want to go there for?”
Courage, courage I told myself. Think of the saints. I had practiced this speech for several hours.
“Well, when we went to Oakland two days ago, they took our class for a tour of the museum and I saw some really neat costumes, clothes that people wore a long time ago. I thought you and Daddy wouldn’t mind if I went back to look at them again. I got some neat ideas for sewing projects.”
My mother smiled. “Mary. You got ideas for sewing projects when you went to the museum? What could you, I mean, how could you do that? You just had a quick look at some moldy old clothes that nobody wore for a hundred years.”
Courage flew down and sat on my shoulder. “That’s just it, Mom,” I said. “If I had more time, I could maybe make some drawings. I just think that I could do that.”
My mother smiled. “Mary, Mary, who would’ve believed it? You never seem to notice nothing. O.K., you can go on Saturday, just this once.” And she got up from her easy chair and gave me some money, right then and there.
“Here’s enough for the bus each way plus extra to have lunch. Do they have a place to eat there?”
She turned away from me and gave her attention to the television.
“What about Daddy?”
Not even bothering to look away from her soap opera, she said “Oh, don’t worry about him.”
I overheard my mother telling my father about this strange request of mine. I realized for the first time, while listening, that she coordinated her presentations of requests to him with televised sporting events. Because it was football season, there was a “playoff” on television that night, and my father was greatly worked up; the Steelers were involved and he was in his state of grace. I stood at the top of the stairs, fingers crossed, my head bent in a prayerful attitude. My mother slid the whole thing by him, and he said oh all right just as long as she’s back before dark. Just like that.
Part 2 will appear on April 4, 2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment