Aunt Irene told my sister, Bren, that Mom was never the same after 1959.  Bren told me, but,mostly, I already knew.  And I like to tell myself it’s true, that once Mom was different. 

Bren knows the most because she pries the most, plucking at Mom or Aunt Irene with questions that really only pull the ragged edges of a memory closer.  There’s no healing that takes place after discussing it.  Instead, I think all that pulling and tugging just makes a fresh tear.  But Bren pushes.  A decade younger than me, she didn’t grow-up with 1959 still so near and awful, and I’m not sure Bren should prod so much because Mom will say things here and there that let you know she knows she was once different.

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On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge in Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed and sent sixty-four people into the icy waters of the Ohio River, killing forty-six.  It remains the most deadly structural bridge collapse in U.S. history.  It was 5:00 on that day and work commuters were traveling over the bridge to and from shift work at the nearby aluminum plant.  Christmas shoppers were out gathering trees and gifts.  It’s hard not to picture them bundled in wooly winter coats and hats, jolly from shopping, gloved hands gripping steering wheels, Christmas carols on car radios, secret gifts stashed in car trunks, wooden baskets of Star Chocolates and cardboard boxes of candy canes in backseats, all waiting for Christmas morning.  It’s what my own mother and father would have done on a similar day as the holiday drew near.  The bridge was full and swaying, survivors say.  Charlene Wood, pregnant with twins at the time, approached the bridge as it shook so strenuously her car stalled.  She told reporters she put her car in neutral and coasted backward, saving herself and the lives of her unborn babies by sixty seconds.  Hers was the last car standing on the precipice.  The rest had fallen into the river.

And on that day in 1967, our neighbor, Dorothy Forman, knocked at the front door, and, together, she and Mom seemed to feel the past and the pain of loss anew.

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The Forman’s lived next door to our family throughout my childhood, only moving away after Harold Forman retired from the aluminum plant in his later years, and, together, he and Dorothy went back to the Northern panhandle of West Virginia to be near relatives.  My Mom and Dorothy became close during the nearly forty years they lived side-by-side.  Yet they rarely visited in one another’s homes.  Instead, they met at the clothesline between our two houses and built a relationship while pinning t-shirts and blue jeans to a plastic-coated cord stretched between metal poles.  

My Mom, who typically shied away from relationships and seemed always mad at Aunt Irene for some reason or another so found ways to avoid her, felt close to Dorothy.  Mom once told me that whenever she saw Dorothy at the clothesline, she’d grab her own basket (even if it was empty) and head out to the yard, such was her desire to visit.  Mom and Dorothy hung everything they could on the clothesline, including towels and even their husbands’ underwear.  Tucking into bed with fresh, air-dried sheets remains a firm and glorious memory from my childhood and one that reminds me of Mom and Dorothy standing on tiptoes, stretching to secure the sheets, somehow chatting away with pins clasped between teeth.  I overheard them once, talking about how the other nearby women had scolded them for hanging their nightgowns on the clothesline during evening shift at the aluminum plant.  “The men are home during the day,” they repeated, “and might see your nightgowns drying on the line.”  Both Mom and Dorothy snickered at the thought and teased about the gossip.  But Dorothy pulled her nightgowns in while my mom let them stay.  An act of defiance, I suppose, and one bound to keep the other women at bay.  

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Howard Boggs was twenty-four years old and married when the Silver Bridge fell and he, his wife, and their baby daughter plunged into the frigid Ohio River.  The bridge started shaking up and down, Boggs told reporters.  “I don’t know how I got out.  I caught hold of something,” he said.  Boggs’ young wife, Marjorie Boggs, and their eighteen-month-old daughter, Kristy, were not rescued with him.  “I couldn’t swim,” Boggs explained.  

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Recently, Mom told me she used to worry about Dorothy because Harold Forman was so controlling.  “Controlling?” I asked.  “What do you mean, Mom?”  She cleared her throat and continued.  “Well,” she said, “For example, he only gave her enough money for groceries, absolutely nothing else.”  So, of course, I asked what she meant by nothing else.  “Don’t be silly,” Mom replied.  “What do you think I mean by nothing else?  I mean nothing else, not even panties,” she whispered.  “Panties,” I echoed in shock.  “Yes.  Panties!  She made her own out of old bits of cloth.”  I was surprised because I never knew that about the Forman’s.  Dorothy was so kind and soft-spoken to all the kids in the area.  She even kept a ceramic jar of crunchy sugar cookies that she’d hand out liberally when we came to play or ride bikes.   She would stand in the doorway between her kitchen and the carport, remove the heavy lid, and let us each reach in to take a cookie from the jar.  “Once,” Mom continued. “Harold gave Dorothy $20.00 for her birthday.  She came to the clothesline to ask me what I thought she ought to do with it.”  I could picture the moment, Dorothy cutting through the grass in a dark dress cinched at the waist, heavy stockings (always) and in any weather, and black oxford shoes with thick heels and slippery laces.  My own mother would’ve had her hair piled high on her head and she’d be wearing her navy-blue, polyester pants and coordinating orange t-shirt.  It was nearly all that fit her, having gained – according to Aunt Irene who told Bren – enormous amounts of weight after 1959.  My mother’s wedding ring, a thick band of unadorned gold, would be slicing into her finger as she squeezed each clothespin, leaving her finger cracked and red.  I’d seen that often enough myself.   

“Mom,” I pleaded, “What did you tell her to do with the $20.00 dollars?”  “Well,” she said, “I asked her what she’d like that she’d always wanted.”  Dorothy’s reply that day was make-up.   Mom said, “Dorothy went down to Cohen’s Drug Store and bought a bottle of creamy-colored foundation, a wand of mascara, a compact of rosy blush, and a bottle of perfume.”  I guess I was expecting Mom to say she bought several packages of women’s underwear, and I even asked why she didn’t get those instead of the make-up.  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom continued, “those wouldn’t have been visible.”   

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The news of the bridge collapse interrupted television that December evening over fifty years ago and already the terrible reports were coming in.  Dorothy must have been alone in the house with only her two school-aged sons for company.  Gary, the older son, was nearly in high school at the time and much too old for us, but we played constantly with their younger son, John.  He was close to our age and had a glorious train set that he kept on a big card table in the basement.  He added to it whenever he saved enough money for another piece of track or a coal cart to hook to the shiny-black engine that ran around and around the tabletop oval.  There were even tiny people and small bushes positioned around the track or standing near a miniature train station.  John even had a little black dog that he stood next to a tiny man who carried a lunch box and wore dark-green pants and a yellow shirt.  I loved looking at it – such a perfect world.   

Gary and John were Dorothy’s two surviving sons, her twin boys having died at the age of two for a reason no one ever understood.  Lingering fevers, terrible coughs, limbs that stopped working, and then nothing.  My own parents had lost a daughter, a dark-haired, chubby infant that wouldn’t eat, fussed constantly, and faded slowly away.  She was born in 1959, my parents first child.  My mother sometimes says things that let you know she still lingers in that terrible loss.  She’ll say, “The baby’s doll was in the attic but was ruined by the leaking roof.”  Or, just recently, when she was invited to a baby shower for one of Aunt Irene’s granddaughters, she said, “The women at church had a shower for me before the baby was born.”  My mother, restrained by the nurses, wasn’t allowed to hold her daughter as she died.  She fought hard, Aunt Irene told Bren, to get to her, but the hospital wouldn’t allow it.  They pinned her to the bed and told her to wait.  It was 1959.  It was the way things were handled.  I think Mom still feels and hears the struggle and doesn’t know what to do when the memories visit.  I’m a mother, now, myself, and can’t even imagine the horror and the images that must overwhelm her at times, that must seep-in and invade whenever someone needs something from the attic or she goes shopping at Walmart and hears a baby cry.  Surely, she must think of her own tiny baby alone, gasping and crying at the very end.  I think it was especially like that when my brothers (Michael and Clery) and I were young and the loss was still so fresh, when the doll and the toys and the tiny clothes hadn’t yet been touched by a leaking roof.  I imagine her back then, pulling the folding ladder down from the ceiling in the hallway, sneaking up to the attic after everyone was in bed, just to look and touch.  I think she just didn’t know what to do with all that hurt that wouldn’t quiet down and leave her alone.  I would never ask— then or now— and stir her thoughts all over. 

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“Your mother was different after that,” Aunt Irene explained to Bren.  Certainly, we knew Mom had a temper and slept a lot.  When Michael and Clery and I were little, we slipped in and out of the house, catching the screen door on a hip or with a hand, so as not to wake her in the middle of the day.  We slunk to the willow trees, tear-streaked faces, and pulled branches to hand her for a switching.  We sat motionless while she dumped ice-cold water over our heads to quiet us down.  We listened while she berated us as “no count” or shook us until our heads snapped back and forth and our faces turned crimson.  The most frightening was her angry promise to “set your world on fire,” which meant a sound whipping.  We watched and noticed as Dad did the grocery shopping, the cleaning, sometimes the cooking all while working a full-time job, often getting us ready for school after an all-night shift at the aluminum plant.  

I think Dorothy must have been different, too, at some point, but a different kind of different, a less angry different, a different that was somehow nearly invisible and defeated.  I can’t ever imagine her as angry, and I never once saw either of her sons out at the trees to get a switch.  It’s possible John took his whippings in secret like we did, but it feels unimaginable to picture Dorothy thrashing at anyone’s bare legs.  Dorothy, my mother later explained, would slip into deep sleeps, sometimes sleeping for days at a time.  “Then,” Mom said, “she’d wake-up screaming at the top of her lungs.”  No one could console her it seemed.  Mom even admitted that Harold did all he could during those times, even finding a doctor at the university in Morgantown at one point.  “They think it’s something chemical in her system,” Mom always said. “But I know it isn’t,” she’d add.   

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I do my mother’s Christmas shopping for her in her aging years.  Together, we discuss what she’d like to give to Michael, Clery, and Bren.  Usually a nice sweater for Michael.  “He’s a sharp dresser,” she always reminds me.  “So choose something nice.”  So I do, and I get something warm for Clery because he works outside and so does Bren’s husband, George.  I usually choose house slippers or a candle for Clery’s wife and for Bren.  I choose gloves and socks made from SmartWool, necklaces, nail polish, and wallets for all the teenagers, Lego sets, Barbie dolls, and Nerf Guns for the youngest.  And she wants to have a nice box of candy or a little tin of cookies for Aunt Irene.  She and my uncle stop by around Christmas just for a short visit and Mom thinks it’s nice to give them a little something, “Nothing big,” she reminds me, “Just a little something.”  I brought it all to her house a couple of weeks before the holiday.  She wants to see it first.  Otherwise, I would have just wrapped it myself.  Instead, Bren will need to do the wrapping since she lives close.  It was December 15th when I drove the gifts to Mom’s house this year.  The date wasn’t on my mind, but it was on hers.  I carried the gifts, boxed and labeled, to a spare bedroom and went through them with her.  She seemed distracted, like she wasn’t really interested, which was unusual because she likes to decorate and get ready for the holiday.  “Mom,” I asked, “Do you like this for Clery?”  Long pause. . .  “Mom, do you think Clery will like this canvas vest?” – Hhhuuummm, she muttered, and then continued, “Do you realize this is December 15th, the day the Silver Bridge fell?”  

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I heard Dorothy Forman that day she came to the door in 1967.  I lingered in the hallway as they spoke, eavesdropping and staring at the homemade snowman on the closet door, a Christmas decoration my parents had made together by cutting out circles of white felt and gluing them onto a piece of dark-blue foiled wrapping paper.  It looked like a nighttime winter scene, another perfectly calm world.  Dad brought it down from the attic along with the other decorations and fixed it to the closet door every Christmas, the edges becoming thick with vanilla-colored masking tape from all the years of taping.  The snowman’s stomach was dotted with three spots of black paint.  He wore a black-felt top hat, with a thin piece of red ribbon as its scarf.  I rubbed the satiny ribbon between my fingers, nervous and fiddling with it, as Mom invited Dorothy inside.  The men in the neighborhood were away for their evening shift at the aluminum plant, no one needing to cross the bridge, so we knew they were safe, but, still, the phone had been ringing to check if Hank, my father, might have been on the bridge for some reason.  It’s likely something similar was happening at the Forman’s house and most every house in our small town. 

It was unusual to see Dorothy in our home and not in the yard, and I could tell she had hurried over, left without a second thought it seemed.  I knew because it was cold outside and she didn’t have on a coat or boots or even a hat to keep from catching a cold.  We had to wear our hats when we walked to the bus stop or played outside in the cold and snow.  I knew she should have bundled up for the walk, but, instead, she just showed up.  Her hair was set in the usual wavy auburn curls, styled at home, I’m sure, with rollers and Dippity-Do, the way my own mother did hers.  Her dress was gathered snug around her waist with a thin belt and her face was gentle, as it always was, but strained and sad.  My mother slunk down on the couch, too, not across from her, not beside her, but practically on top of her, and they leaned their heads together.   “I heard on the radio,” Dorothy said, “that a woman was found in a submerged car, drowned but clutching her baby against her chest.”  

“I imagine she was,” Mom said.  “Yes.  Of course she would be.”

I released the tiny red ribbon at that moment and left them alone.  Listening-in and playing with the snowman suddenly felt wrong, something a child would do.  

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