A Day in Two Lives

A Day in Two Lives

All the persons, names, places and events depicted in

Jan's stories are fictional.

Any resemblance to actual events, persons or locations is purely coincidental.

ASHLEIGH STARED AT the images on her family’s black and white TV. It was nighttime. Bruce and Vanessa Sterling were driving down a country road. A car suddenly appeared and they looked frightened. There was a sharp turn to the right. Bruce Sterling gritted his teeth as he took the fork in the road. He narrowly missed the menacing car that had come right at him.

Ashleigh laid her head back down on the pillow. Her grandmother had abandoned the new canister vacuum that her mother had purchased a few days before and was sitting in the overstuffed chair watching her favorite soap opera, a half-drunk bottle of Coca Cola in her hand. Ashleigh tugged her yellow blanket up around her and took a last sip of the tea with milk and sugar that her grandmother had fixed for her before she set about doing her chores.

“What’s that for?”

Her grandmother turned in her direction and followed Ashleigh’s pointed finger to the attachments that still lay inside the canister.

“I don’t know, child. Now hush!”

Ashleigh didn’t know what saddened her more. That her grandmother rarely spoke to her anymore or that she didn’t use Cherokee to talk to her. She remembered that her grandmother had named her “Little Bear,” but couldn’t recall what it was in her grandmother’s native language. Her mother had forbidden Ashleigh to speak it once she reached school age. She missed the closeness she had shared with her grandmother a few years before. The language had bound them. Once that had been taken away, it seemed that there was nothing left to share.

Her grandmother had lived with Ashleigh for as long as she could remember. Ashleigh knew her grandmother’s routine by heart. Every morning, her grandmother would get up while the children were getting ready for school. She’d have breakfast after they had swarmed out the door for their respective elementary, junior high, and senior high schools. Then she’d do the dusting and the vacuuming. Next, she would watch Jeopardy, Love of Life, The Guiding Light, and Search for Tomorrow on their old black and white television. Grandma loved the game show and she loved her “stories,” as she called them. Ashleigh liked them too. Especially Love of Life. Vanessa Sterling was pretty. Ashleigh enjoyed watching her as she tried to endure the constant scheming of her wicked sister, Meg.

Just like me and Judy, she thought. Judy’s last trick happened the night before. She took Ashleigh’s clothes from the hangars and threw them on the floor of the closet they shared with their grandmother. Then she complained loudly to her mother that Ashleigh wasn’t hanging her church clothes up properly. It had gotten Ashleigh’s rear end paddled and her mother had threatened never to buy her any more nice clothes since she didn’t appreciate what she had.

Judy stood there gloating while Ashleigh was victimized by her scheming again. Her body still ached from the beating. Her mother had only paddled her with her hand. But her father had used the belt…again. The injustice of it all made Ashleigh sick to her stomach. This morning, due to the welts on her back, buttocks, and legs, and her stomach distress, she’d stayed home from school and was planted on the living room couch to wait out the day.

After the breakfast and lunch dishes were done, Grandma would start dinner. With nine mouths to feed on her mother’s Chicago teacher’s salary, there wasn’t a lot to go around, but at least it was good.

¨¨¨

“PUSH! FINE. NOW once more!” The young wife bore down despite her exhaustion and then was told to stop. She suddenly heard her baby’s cry. Loud and lusty. Tired and relieved, she lay back on the delivery table and waited patiently as the nurse mopped the perspiration from her forehead.

“It’s a girl. You have a fine, healthy girl!”

¨¨¨

ASHLEIGH FINGERED THE items in her “collection”. It was a cigar box that she had taken from her father’s trash bin in his darkroom. He was a newspaper photographer and developed his pictures in the basement of their home. He had a complete photo lab down there and whiled away the hours either developing pictures or talking on his citizen’s band and ham radios.

She picked up the piece of quartz that she’d found when they went to visit a friend of the family at the state mental hospital. Ashleigh liked him. He’d given her one of her other ‘treasures’, a watch with a broken strap. “Elgin” it said on the face, right above the number VI. Elgin watches were good watches. She played with it for awhile and wondered if she’d be able to make it work. Or maybe she should just ask for one for Christmas, or her tenth birthday, which fell a few days after. She pulled out her Christmas list and a short pencil and added Elgin watch to the list after Mouse Trap and Easy Bake Oven.

Ashleigh put the list back in her box and wondered where the broken shoe lace and the rusty nail had come from. Then she noticed a wadded up piece of paper that she didn’t recognize.

Thanks for the coins. I left you change. Ha ha.

Judy. She’d stolen the few coins that Ashleigh had left. The coins were old and Ashleigh wanted to use them to start her coin collection. She’d had more coins in the summer, until her sister decided to buy ice cream for her friends with the money. She’d bought a package of Hostess Twinkies for herself at the “Little Store,” a small neighborhood store down in a basement that sold bread and milk and other items that eventually convenience stores would sell.

She didn’t dare try to get even or to set the record straight with her parents. Judy was always ready with a punch to her stomach or an “Indian Sun Burn” to her arm. Judy was her parents’ favorite. She could do no wrong. She got perfect grades and she could draw and paint, and she was perfect. Her father used up endless rolls of film photographing her. When Ashleigh was born, Judy became her mortal enemy, doing everything possible to show Ashleigh how unwanted she was.

A strange sound came from the kitchen. Ashleigh closed her box and put it aside. She peeked in the kitchen and realized her grandmother was using the new electric can opener that her father had brought home from the department store where he moonlighted as a camera department salesman. Satisfied, Ashleigh returned to her place on the couch and waited for the bowl of soup and the toast that her grandmother was fixing.

While she waited, Ashleigh watched the afternoon movie. Tarzan swung through the jungle from one hanging vine to another in search of his son who laughed at his adopted father until his footing slipped and he fell from the tree he’d been hiding in…right at the feet of some hunters who stood before him with elephant guns. The man holding a faded map pointed above and cried out just as Tarzan dropped to the ground to protect his son from the intruders. Ashleigh closed her eyes and pretended that she was Tarzan, swinging through the jungle, and without thinking about it, she bellowed out Tarzan’s cry.

Suddenly, she found herself covered in soup. Her grandmother gave her a tongue lashing in Cherokee for frightening her and making her drop the TV tray and its contents. Ashleigh was relieved that her father wasn’t home. Anything he perceived as a slight to his mother was reason enough for a beating with his belt.

She helped her grandmother clean up the mess. Once she had changed into her play clothes, Ashleigh took the soiled blankets and her pajamas down to the basement and put them in the washing machine. She dropped a couple of Salvo tablets into the washer and turned it on. She climbed back up the basement steps and went to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich.

A little while later, there was a knock at the door. Ashleigh peeked through the blinds that covered the window next to the front door. Herbie, one of the neighborhood boys, had returned from his aunt’s farm where he’d spent the past few months and stood on her porch, patiently waiting for her to open the door. When she opened it, she saw him holding a covered shoebox.

“Can you come out to play? I got something to show you.”

“I can’t, Herbie. I was home sick today.”

“Look what I got,” he insisted.

When he lifted the box cover, six baby chicks were inside. “My aunt let me hatch them and bring them home with me. They got sick and I’m going to take care of them. Want to help?”

Ashleigh didn’t have a chance to answer. Her brothers and sisters were on their way home from school and were about to walk up to their door. “I gotta go.” Ashleigh shut the door and climbed the stairs to the second floor where she retreated to her room and tried to become invisible.

¨¨¨

“WE HAVE A girl!” the expectant father exclaimed. He’d nearly fainted from relief when he was told the news. As soon as he was allowed, he made his way through the busy maternity ward to see his wife and newborn daughter. He could hardly wait until he could take them back home to their place in the west Texas countryside.

¨¨¨

“HI BEAUTIFUL! HAPPY Birthday!” Ashleigh carried the breakfast tray to her lover as she propped herself up in the bed.

“Another year older,” her lover grumbled.

“And you’re as young and beautiful as ever.”

“Well see what you think ten years from now.” She accepted the tray and picked up her fork for a piece of the omelet on her plate.

“Remember, sweetheart, I’ll always be ten years ahead of you. And thankful for every moment we’re together.”

“Who’d have thunk it? A mixed raced kid from Chicago grows up to marry a white country girl from west Texas?”

Ashleigh settled beside her and snatched a piece of toast from the tray. “I’d have to say, that the day you were born, this was the farthest thing from my mind.”

“Are you happy that your life turned out this way?”

Ashleigh returned to the thoughts and memories that she’d entertained while she was preparing breakfast. “No comparison. For the first time in my life, you make me feel loved, appreciated, and cherished. So, birthday girl, when you’ve finished eating, I’ll show you how happy you do make me.”