The Best and the Worst

My life is colored by the best and the worst.

My best and worst stories collection started with a pink plastic journal secured for privacy with a small silver lock and key. My Aunt Cris observed my yearning for this gem during our August back-to-school supply shopping spree. There, I paced the stationary aisle, consumed by a weighty decision: Should I blow all the contents of my savings on that pink plastic journal? The one that kept calling me like the sirens from Homer’s Odyssey? Do I buy it, even when it is not on sale? Or do I stand by, riddled with jealousy and rage, as some well-financed scribbler snagged my pink treasure? 

The dated tiny pages of my pink journal forced an editorial habit pressing me to whittle each day down to the best and the worst.

The best of that day occurred when I opened that pink journal. My heart twirled with love – maybe, maybe I’d be a writer.

The worst happened on that same sticky, hot August day. My mother, egg-shaped in the late stages of pregnancy, pushed the lawnmower over the six acres of land we called a backyard when the mower spit out a sharp rock. The rock crashed into Bernadette’s leg, leaving a crater-sized wound. 

My brother John and I heard her screams. Using our bodies as her crutches, we steered her shaking body into the house and onto the living room couch. There, she lay crying. 

I had never seen my mother cry. 

Having earned our Girl and Boy Scout badges in first aid, John and I were prepared – and scared. I grabbed a handful of gauze from the First Aid Kit and applied direct pressure to the bleeding gash. John wet a wash cloth and gently wiped our mother’s face removing smears of mud, and beads of sweat. Her normally bouncy fringe-cut hair was pasted tight to her head like a swimming cap. Her face as white as if powered with Pillsbury flour.

“Is she dead?” my brother whispered, tilting his body toward me as we knelt beside our mother. Recalling a scene from ER, I placed my hand above her nose and mouth and found her breath.

“Not dead,” I reported, “but we better call 911.”

“No 911,” Mom sprang to life as if we’d applied smelling salts. 

“At least, not dead yet.” Her voice was horse and dry. “Just let me rest.” And we did, checking that she was still breathing every few minutes. 

I sat back on the cool tile floor, pressing gauze on Mom’s wound and holding my brother’s hand. At that moment, I loved my precious brother more than I ever have. His beet-red face was stained with tears and twisted with worry. Tenderness flooded his lazy lagoon blue eyes. My darling brother, my sweet Bread Head, my always reliable friend.  

I took in the whole of my mother. Sweat-pasted grass clippings covered her body. Her worn white sneakers smeared black and green, baggy paint-spattered black shorts, and a faded yellow Marquette University Dental School T-shirt stretched over the beachball-shaped lump that would, in several weeks, be my baby sister Margaret Rose. Sweat rolled down her neck; her arms hung flaccid at her sides, veins blue and large, fingers swollen. I thought of my journal; today this was the worst. 

And then my mind, or perhaps it was my soul, lifted out of my body and floated directly across the street, entering the home of Mrs. Carmalita Angellicio. My spirit was greeted there by my imagined holograph of the perfectly coiffed Mrs. Angellicio – size six white petal pushers, form-fitting exercise bra, and gilded sandals. 

Since it was Friday, her weekly Spa Day, Mrs. A was freshly manicured, pedicured, and massaged. Her rich black hair folded elegantly into a stylish French twist – tiny whisps of curls framing her rosy face. With make-up applied professionally, she glowed, eager to take my tattered spirit on a tour of a life I envied. 

We slid past the spotless living room — white sofa, armchairs, carpets.? White? One after-school peanut butter and jelly snack in our family, that sofa would look like a Jackson Pollock painting. 

   We floated past the spotless kitchen, where half a pie sat undisturbed, covered by a sparkling glass dome. In my family, any dessert disappeared instantly, leaving not so much as a crumb.

Ushered down the peppermint-scented hallway, I peeked into the twin’s bedroom. Bella and Patricia Angellicio, two nine-year-old girls as stunning as their mother, sporting perfectly matched coiffed hair every day of the week, were in my third-grade class, and thus, I thanked the Holy Spirit that at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, we wore uniforms. The required jumpers, tights, and saddle shoes saved me from wardrobe shame. On weekends, the fashion-conscious twins were always dressed in runway perfection.  

Their shared bedroom? Yep, beds canopied in pink with down comforters to match. Personalized homework stations chocked with school supplies.   

Jealousy gripped my guts. My bedroom housed four girls and contained two shared full-sized beds, one dresser, and well-worn blankets. 

Mrs. A nudged me forward. With flair, she opened the door at the end of the hallway. 

“My studio,” She beamed.

One room, one entire room, only for her. Sure, she was back in school, finishing her degree in Architecture. But one whole room?  

The Studio: The east wall was tiled in cork and pinned with drawings, paint swatches, and photographs of fancy homes and fancy rooms cut from fancy magazines. Her desk? A long thick piece of glass, peppered with rolls of architectural plans, a slanted drawing board in the center, and vases of colored pens and pencils. The west side of the room held a treadmill and TV. The south wall? French doors open to a stone patio featuring a café table and fluted iron chairs.  

I wanted this room for my mother – I imagined moving in my mother’s treasures, placing Bernadette’s portable Singer Sewing machine and a pile of Vogue patterns on the glass desk. In the center of the room, my mind positioned a manikin draped in red satin and then tacked swatches of material and colorful sketches of evening gowns on the cork wall.

I’d found the best, and I wanted this best for my mother. My soul floated back across the street to Bernadette’s side. 

For days I was haunted by these images – the worst and the best. Bernadette wounded, suffering in sweaty stillness. While directly across the street, a perfectly coiffed, painted, and buffed Mrs. A soared to creative heights in her own private studio. 

Why? I asked my journal was one life, so not like the other? 

Fighting back tears, I put this question to my Aunt Cris as I watched her hand-mixed a double batch of brownies. She lifted the chocolate-covered spoon and, with two beats, announced, “Birth Control.”

I grabbed my ever-present pink journal and, on the page dedicated to that day, in picture-perfect cursive wrote: Best of the Day – Birth Control.

While as a nine-year-old kid, I had no idea what Birth Control was, I was determined to get as much of it as I could possibly find for my poor, wounded mother. 

The following day, Saturday, I sprang into action mindful of my quest. I’d have to endure a piano lesson before hitting the library card catalog to research ‘birth control.’  

Dad dropped me off on the way to his dental office for my weekly piano lesson with Madame Vavoroffsky, the owner and sole instructor of our Humboldt Avenue Music Conservatory. 

The conservatory – a closet sublet from the adjacent Buster Brown Shoe Store – was always thick with cigarette smoke. I’d swim blindly through the dense clouds, tapping my way to the baby grand piano, which filled the tiny space. Often, on the way, I bumped into our chain-smoking maestro.  

Ah, Madame Vavvorffsky – picture Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the long black wand of a cigarette holder perched between the fingers of a woman shaped like an enormous potato. A woman permanently draped in black taffeta, heavily perfumed, lips smeared cherry red, and a neck strangled by strings of pearls. No matter the season, Madame was wrapped in a frayed mink coat that rested on her bulky shoulders. She wore the mink even in August, which Wisconsin natives call ‘Summer.’  

Those of us studying with Madame admired her one dazzling cigarette trick. We marveled at her ability to grow a 3-inch-long log of ash at the end of her cigarette wand, and then sensing the exact moment when the log would drop, hold it deftly over the mound of ash we students dubbed Mt. St. Helens, adding yet another layer of slag to the enormous pile. 

Rumor had it that Madame, in her heyday, had been a famous Russian opera star – a graduate of the esteemed Moscow Conservatory of Music.  A woman so fearless that, holding the hand of her cello-playing lover, leaped over Gorbachev’s iron curtain, dodging rounds of machine gun bullets, and landing safely in the arms of Milwaukee’s appreciative artistic community.

I may have absorbed more of Madame’s musical brilliance had I ignored medical warnings regarding the dire effects of secondary smoke. Fearing lung cancer and a shortened life span, I held my breath speeding through the assigned pages of Volume 811, Opus 36 of Clementi Sonatinas, ripped off arpeggios in whatever key we were studying, grabbed my next assignment, and flew out the door. Doubled over, I’d gasp for breath, then somewhat oxygenated, stagger across the street to fully recover at our local public library.

Resuming my quest for Birth Control, I unlocked my pick diary, opened it, and slid the treasure before the sky-blue eyes of my favorite librarian – Ms. Rachel Marie Boyle of the Humboldt Avenue Library Reference Division. This elegant ginger-haired woman with legs as long as a baby giraffe easily reached the card catalog’s top drawers. Where due to my lack of height, I needed her help with the letter B.   

“I’m on a mission,” I said, pointing to the well-crafted cursive words on my journal page, ‘Birth Control.’  

Lifting quizzical eyebrows, the Dublin native asked, “Girl, dus yer mader know yer ‘ere?” 

“Of course,” I said, twisting her meaning to fit my purpose, “It’s Saturday morning; where else would I be?”

“Right, den. ” She grabbed a pad of paper, pulled a yellow pencil from a curly pile of orange hair, and headed for the card catalog. 

Ms. Boyle navigated the upper level of the catalog effectively and, within a few minutes, placed a stack of books on the table in front of me. 

“Most a deeze ere texts. I nabbed one dat I tink yu’ll be fond a.” She handed me a Young Adult biography of Margaret Sanger. 

I paged through the textbooks. They all offered the same illustration – the body parts unique to us females: ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, cervical canal, vagina, and hymen. For sure, news to me that the insides of us women had some rather unique and exciting organs. Nice to know. And potential material for the best of the day. However, the worst of the day screamed in my ears, “You still have not found that darn birth control.” 

Margaret Sanger’s YA biography? Paydirt. Seems Margaret felt the same way about her dear exhausted mother as I felt about my own wounded one. Margaret wanted her mother to have a softer life, fewer children, and more time for the things her mother loved – just like I wished Mrs. Angellicio’s life and studio for my mother. 

  While I was no closer to harvesting that birth control, I had found Margaret Sanger’s story – a story that provided the best argument – an argument that might jump-start my mother’s own quest for birth control.

I discarded a few texts and brought the best of the pile home. I found my mother, hands deep in bread dough, at the kitchen table. 

“Maria Francesca, some stack of books you got there! Aiming for another Girl Scout badge?” 

“Nope” I said, assuming a newly minted Margaret Sanger rescue smile. “Mom, these are for you.”

I pushed the pile in front of my mother, who rubbed her floury hands against the green baking apron with Bernadette embroidered across the top. She paged through the pile. 

Reverently, I lifted Margaret Sanger’s book, “Mom, this one is the best.” In what seemed like slow motion, she reached for the biography and sliced through the pages of the first chapter.

After some time, she raised her head and looked wide-eyed at me. Then she ran her hands slowly over her face and sighed, “Maria Francesca.” 

I do not know if she liked the books. I do not know if she read the books. I do not even know if those books were for her. I do know that the child growing in her womb would be her last.

In the years to come – as my girl body slowly transformed, I embraced the challenge of caring for my developing womanhood. I purchased training bras, depleted boxes of Kotex, and boldly experimented with tampons. I faced the sixth-grade sex education curriculum with valor – yes, I was shocked at the reality of intercourse and the challenge posed as one egg attempts to dodge 500 million sperm. I marveled at how pregnancy made such fine use of our female organs and blushed royally at the mystery of childbirth. 

Through the years, I would often look back on my mother’s life. I’d recall the accident and the dream of Mrs. Angellicio’s studio and I would know for sure that what I once so desperately wanted for my mother was the very thing I most wanted for myself.

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