Omaha

Jane Snyder

I didn’t know when I would make my father mad. I’d tell him I liked a song on the radio or repeat a joke from school, and he’d go off. I never saw it coming.

When he was in a good mood he was fun.

In May he came home singing I’m Henry the Eighth, I am, I am, cutting a little caper when he came into the kitchen.

Suzie and I ran to him, ready for a treat.

He’d brought home a take-and-bake pizza, a new thing then. My mother was making dinner, had me stirring the gravy, but she took the roast out of the oven, put in the pizza.

He’d just gotten a new job, at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, he told us. A promotion, more money, more opportunities for advancement.

Two weeks before, he’d gone to Omaha for two days to give a talk on labor unions at the university. “They’re flying me down.”

“You must be important,” Suzie said, making him laugh.

He may have told my mother there could be a new job. Suzie and I hadn’t known.

I said I didn’t want to move because my best friend Karen lived in Fargo, three houses down from us. We liked the same things. Reading, playing with trolls, watching Get Smart on TV.

“Suzie isn’t complaining,” he said. “She’s ready for an adventure.”

I put my pizza down. “This is like ashes in my mouth.”

My father took the slice from my plate, tossed it to Finn, our Irish setter.

I could hear my parents arguing that night. My mother cried. We’ve all made friends, she said. She was going to start the pharmacy program at NDSU in September. “Did you forget that?”

Our bedroom was at the top of the stairs; theirs was at the bottom. My bed was closer to the stairs than Suzie’s and I hoped she was asleep.

I’m doing this for you, my father said.

I didn’t ask you to.

Suzie got in bed with me then.

In the morning, my mother chattered. Won’t it be fun exploring new grocery stores? In Fargo they had lefse and almond bark. We never got them in Illinois. Who knows what they’ll have in Omaha?

At dinner my father said the reheated roast had an even better flavor than when it was just cooked.

Suzie said her teacher told her the stockyards in Omaha stink up the whole town.

Why would Miss Nordlund say a thing like that, my father wondered. It wouldn’t stink where we’d live. “Lots of trees and handsome old houses.”

Suzie loved Miss Nordlund, didn’t want my father to think badly of her. “She said I was lucky; Omaha has a wonderful zoo.”

“The Henry Doorly. We’ll go, of course.”

We lived in Omaha for three years, never did. I didn’t care.

After I told Karen about the move, we’d say we’d be best friends forever, distance could not part us. She stopped watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom because she didn’t like hearing them say “Omaha.”

After school ended in June, we were supposed to help my mother with the packing. My father was busy, teaching a special between-sessions seminar.

We wanted to keep everything. Our baby dolls with their few remaining plugs of synthetic blonde hair, projects we’d made in Campfire, games with missing pieces. The orange cotton kitty cat the hospital auxiliary gave me when I had my tonsils out.

“You never play with it,” my mother said.

“She comforts me.”

She flung Kitty Sweet into the Omaha box, gave us dimes for the swimming pool.

Karen was already at the pool with a girl I knew from school, Lana. “I thought you were already gone,” Lana said, but she was friendly and we all played together.

Lana and Karen were going to sleepover camp in July. Earlier in the year there’d been talk of me going too.

They’d be in the advanced swim group, allowed to swim to the floating dock in the middle of the lake, lie on the deck talking, jump into the water when it got hot. The girls who couldn’t swim well stayed in the roped-off area with the younger girls.

I’d have been in the roped-off area. Karen and Lana didn’t mention it.

The movers came for our stuff in the morning of our last day in Fargo, emptying the house. My mother scrubbed the floors. Suzie and I were supposed to clean the bathrooms, one upstairs, one down. Suzie was cranky. I did most of her work, was disappointed when my mother didn’t say anything about it.

At noon Karen and her mother came with a picnic basket and a big bottle of lemonade, ate egg salad sandwiches, grapes, and oatmeal cookies with us on a blanket they’d brought in the backyard. Karen asked to stay with me afterwards, but her mom said she was taking her shopping for camp.

“Four pairs of shorts she’s supposed to have, and six pairs of crew socks. Can you imagine?”

After lunch Suzie complained of having no place to sit in the house. My mother parked the car, a white Dodge Dart Pioneer Wagon, in the shade, rolled down the windows, told me to keep an eye on Suzie, who’d gotten in the back seat. “Daddy will be home any minute now,” she said, went inside to call her friend Lee one last time.

I sat in a patch of white clover in the shade of the tree shading the car. It was cool, smelled good. When I checked on Suzie she was slumped down on the seat, her face a dull red. She wanted water, and I brought her some in a paper cup left from lunch. My mother, done with her call, came too, laid a hand on Suzie’s forehead, then placed my palm on it, asked me, in a woman-to-woman’s voice, if I thought she was sick.

Had to be, we agreed, hot as she was. My mother said she wished she hadn’t packed the thermometer. Suzie rolled onto her stomach.

My father came home pleased with himself, said the seminar had gone well, even better than he’d hoped. The students had kept him for a little while afterwards with excellent questions. He’d propose something similar next year in Omaha.

My mother brought his attention to Suzie, asleep in the back of the car.

Five hours to Sioux Falls, he said. Monday he’d start at UNO, teaching summer school. “We’ll get her some aspirin and Seven-Up. She’ll be right as rain.”

I said I was worried Suzie might get sicker on the way. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

My father asked if I’d forgotten who was in charge. “Do you need a reminder?”

He told my mother to drive, at least to the first stop, said he was tired.

My mother chose to be with Suzie instead, pushed me into the front seat, beside my father.

We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly. I was afraid to ask if I could go in with my mother.

One of the checkers, an older woman who, when we first moved to Fargo, explained to my mother how to serve lefse, warmed up, with butter, cinnamon, and sugar, but don’t you know how to make it yourself, it’s just mashed potatoes, came back to the car with my mother to say goodbye. “Feel better, Sweet Pea,” she told Suzie, who was stretched out in the back seat making little mewling sounds.

“A waste of time,” my father said when we were back on the road.

She handed me a Coke without comment. My father had to ask.

Suzie rested her head in my mother’s lap. My mother laid wet paper towels she’d gotten from the store on her forehead. Finn whined from the back of the station wagon.

“Well, we’re off to a fine start,” my father said after an hour’s drive.

My mother looked down at Suzie, didn’t answer.

I didn’t either. If I took his remark at face value, that we were making good time, and said that was good, it could be a trick. “Good?” he’d ask. “Good your sister is sick? You just say whatever stupid thing comes into your head, don’t you?”

After a while he told my mother he might have committed himself too much these past weeks, but he’d already done the prep for the seminar, and we could use the money. When she still didn’t answer, he asked how Suzie was doing.

“I don’t think she’s as warm.”

“I shouldn’t have had that last Coke,” he said, when we stopped in Brookings, “but they’re so good on a day like this.”

“You don’t even need to drink them,” I told him. “When they’re ice cold like this, just holding them cools you off.”

He smiled at me, didn’t ask why I’d drunk three if holding them was enough.

Suzie might have been doing better. She got up to use the bathroom, stood in the little store inside the gas station looking incuriously at the signs on the wall: The bank don’t sell gas and we don’t cash checks. If it weren’t for bad breath I’d have no breath at all. Confucius say bird in hand makes hard to blow nose.

Back in the car she made mewling sounds in her sleep.

We’ll be in Omaha tomorrow, my father said in Sioux Falls. Suzie woke when we reached our motel, said it looked like Fargo. My father laughed. “No, Pal, I am not driving in circles.”

My mother opened the car door for her, keeping an arm around her, but she stumbled to her knees, vomited on the asphalt for a long time, the clear yellow stuff that smells so bad. She sputtered and I thought she was choking. When she straightened up, I reached out to hold her clammy hand.

“Leave her alone,” my father said, handing me Finn’s leash. “Walk him on the sidewalk. Don’t cross the street.”

I was afraid Finn would run away and I would be responsible for our trip being delayed or even his being run over, but he pulled me back to the car.

My mother took Suzie to the ER and my father checked in. In the room he filled Finn’s water dish and took it to the spot where Suzie had vomited, poured it out. It took him several trips to thin the vomit. I thought it was a nice thing he did. I don’t think anyone from the motel saw her getting sick.

We ate at a restaurant across the street. My father ordered for me, didn’t ask what I wanted.

You’re still breathing through your mouth, he said suddenly. If you knew how distracting it is. And it isn’t as if I haven’t told you about it.

It wasn’t. I told myself he was worried about Suzie. This BLT is good, I said, didn’t ask for dessert.

Suzie and my mother hadn’t returned to the motel. “You never know how long you’ll have to wait in an ER.” He sent me out with Finn. “If you go straight and then turn around, you won’t get lost.”

I kept thinking every white car on the road was my mother and Suzie coming back.

The motel room had an alcove with bunk beds behind a little living room area with a hide-a-bed for my parents. My father was sitting on the hide-a-bed, watching Dragnet, said I should go to bed. “Take the top bunk. Suzie could fall if she gets up during the night.” There was no sense waiting up for Suzie and my mom, he said. Suzie might be admitted to the hospital.

I thought of the letter I’d write to Karen about it, telling her how afraid I was for Suzie.

I fell asleep, woke when my mother tucked Suzie in the bunk underneath me. Some kind of bug, she said. Suzie wasn’t used to the heat, got dehydrated. She’d been given a shot for the nausea, had a of bag of saline solution, salt water, pumped into her arm, and that took care of the fever.

After my father died, I asked my mother about it, if she’d been worried.

“Every time we moved, one of you girls would be sick.” So I must have gotten sick too, on another move. I don’t remember.

That night in Sioux Falls, she laughed when she kissed me, because she could do it standing up straight. “You were wonderful, honey. Thanks.”

When we left for Omaha the next morning, I sat in front with my father. My mother and Suzie slept the two hours or so to Omaha. My father expressed appreciation for my company, praised me when I noticed the wheat was turning yellow here. In North Dakota it was still green.

He said he was looking forward to teaching more graduate and upper division classes in Omaha. So many of his students at NDSU had trouble grasping even basic economic concepts.

For instance, prices. How could a night in a motel room in New York City cost more than a comparable room in Bemidji, they’d ask. They just didn’t get it.

I didn’t tell him it made no sense to me either. If Lifesavers are a nickel a roll at the grocery store, why would they cost more at the airport, I wondered, but I listened to his explanation of how price is determined; how much the merchant needs to make a profit after his other expenses, the local rate for wages, taxes, rent, transportation, and demand, which varies by location among other factors.

I must have expressed adequate understanding because he was pleased. Omaha would be good for me, he said. The high schools are big as colleges. Even the junior high schools offer foreign languages. I’d eat it up.

I didn’t believe my father thought I’d benefit from more challenging schoolwork, but I enjoyed the attention, was disappointed when he began talking about his own growing-up years in Illinois. In the summer he and his friends would pitch a tent in the shade in the backyard, spread blankets on the grass, share comic books and Little Big Books, describe movies they’d seen. So, the cowpokes from the Lucky J Corral told him he’d best get out of town but that was after the sheriff asked him what he knew about the stage to Dalton being robbed yesterday by a fellow about your height. Or maybe it was before. No, wait ….

His mother would come out with a couple of bottles of homemade grape juice for them, my father having told her they didn’t want a pitcher and glasses, preferred passing the bottles around. Whoa, doggies, that’s some good stuff. How ’bout another pull, Liver Lips?

If my grandma went downtown, they’d go inside, call the Dew Drop Inn to ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. “Well, let him out,” they’d say when whoever answered told them they did.

“We thought we were so bad.”

The first time I’d heard that story, he reminded me, I didn’t know Prince Albert was a brand of chewing tobacco.

No reason why a charming young lady like you would, he said. He began talking about a friend of his, Ned, from even earlier times.

A sweet kid, according to my father. “My dad liked him, would always spot us a dime when he came over.”

Back then a dime was worth something, he said. A soda, sure, they could each have one. Or a cone or a cherry phosphate, but when they were gone, they were gone, and candy could last all afternoon. Not an easy decision. Ned moved to Decatur in second grade.

Decatur is about an hour’s drive from Hillsboro, my father’s hometown. My

grandparents had relatives there, went often. I don’t know why they didn’t take my father to visit Ned, but my father only remembered seeing him one more time after he moved to Decatur. “Walking up the drive to my house on a fine summer morning.” Ned had come to town with his mother, asked him to go to the fair with him. Surely they’d have asked my grandmother for permission, but my father didn’t mention that, or if she’d made him a lunch, or told him when he had to be home, and, at the fair itself, you usually run out of time or money before you get to do everything you want, maybe get stuck at the top of the Ferris wheel in the glaring sun, but all my father talked about was two small boys, walking hand in hand through a golden day.

They went on all the rides, stuffed themselves with hotdogs, cotton candy, pie. At the horse races they picked out the ones they’d bet on if they were old enough to bet. “Serious, you know, the way little boys are, talking about fetlocks. Oh, we had ourselves a time.”

When it got hot, they went into the cool, dusky barns to look at the animals in the 4-H exhibits. Handsome, feisty, comical, lively, massive, affectionate.

We were in Omaha by then, looking for 482 South 84th Street, a brick house with a sold sign, the new house my mother had warned Suzie and me not to criticize.

The last time I saw Neddy, he said.

I liked that story, I told him.

It wasn’t a story, he said. It really happened.

I knew it had, knew my father had been happy.

Suzie woke when we pulled into the driveway in front of our new house. “Oh,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”