My Very Own Avengers

I slammed the door and locked it behind me as I rushed into our apartment with a small grocery bag in my hands. Sobbing uncontrollably, I stood by the door, trembling. My parents saw the blood had drained from my face and knew something was terribly wrong, but all they could do was wait for me to tell my story. My mother took the bag from me, sat me on the couch, and waited for the waves of convulsive gasps and stuttering to calm.

My parents had planned for us to move to the Chicago area as soon as I finished third-grade. When I told all my 8-year-old friends good-bye, it was with both sadness and a little excitement for what was to come. I was grateful it was the last day of school and I wasn’t being jerked out of the only school and home I had known, in the middle of the school year. We were moving north to follow work.

My dad had most recently been working on sewer lines. Or water lines. Maybe both. I remember him digging into ditches and sewers full of horrendous things that should never be flushed down toilets and him coming home from jobs covered from head to toe in human waste and having to burn his clothing and boots. There was great excitement in seeing the brand new one thousand dollar bills when Daddy paid cash for a small backhoe to make the ditch digging easier. It seemed life was looking up. He and his work were in demand and he had lots of people calling to hire him.

“We’ve got things going our way now, Sis,” he always said when things were going well and he was happy. Until they weren’t.

One day two strangers came to the house and talked to Daddy outside. My mom and I peeked out the front window. We knew something was wrong and it wasn’t a friendly visit. From the bits and pieces my 7-year-old mind could decipher, the men were threatening my dad because of the work he was doing. I never knew if they were union men telling him he couldn’t legally be doing the work they were licensed to do or if they were corrupt men who illegally controlled the union men. Either way, my dad had to sell his backhoe and get out of the business. That meant moving north where we already had a number of family members living, and finding new work.

We moved to a Chicago suburb. My mother was happy to be near a couple of her brothers and two sisters and their families who were already living there, but that’s where her happiness ended. She was fearful of living so close to Chicago and was fearful to let her children out of her sight. It verged on paranoia. We lived there for nearly two years and there were many more things I couldn’t do than I could. The library was too far to walk to. Because my mother was afraid of water, I couldn’t go to the pool. When my closest girlfriend had a birthday party at a horse arena, I couldn’t go because she was afraid I’d be hurt. Sometimes it was a lonely two years.

We made a few friends with neighbor kids, but even though our property adjoined a grade school’s, I had to be bussed several miles away to a different school that first year. My younger sister Geri and I were invited to a little boy’s birthday party in a nearby apartment building. This we could do. We put on our best short sets–matching flowered pedal pushers and orange shirts, with freshly polished white tennis shoes and white Bobby socks. Our excitement soon burst when the birthday boy’s mother wouldn’t let us in. It was just plain weird. She said it was a “dress up” party and we would have to be wearing dresses to come. We ran back home and told Mother. She said we were not going back. She was adamant. Our mother was as stubborn as they came, but so was I, and I somehow convinced her it would be okay. I can’t believe I even wanted to return to that party after being insulted, but I think that’s how desperately I wanted to have friends and be a part of something in this new place.

One thing I was allowed to do, was run errands to the 7-Eleven directly across the street. One evening after supper, I was sent to the convenience store to pick up two snack cakes for my father’s lunch bucket the next day. It was getting cooler out and daylight was waning, so I hurried to get the cakes. As I left the store, crossed the street, and was walking down the gravel driveway next to the ground level apartments we lived in, two boys walked toward me. One was taller than the other and they were dressed entirely in black. I could feel the unrest and I became anxious. The older one began hassling me.

“Where you think you’re going?”

“H-h-h ome.”

“What do you have in that bag?”

“C-c-c akes for my dad.” He mocked me and grabbed the bag.

As I stood there petrified, I recognized the smaller boy. He had been in my 4th grade class the year before. He was a boy who seemed older than everyone else in the class and didn’t often go to school.

I was trying not to let tears betray me, but my quivering lips and inability to speak without my entire body shaking already were. I was afraid of what they might do next.

“Please give it back to me.” Even my words trembled and hot tears began to involuntarily stream down my cheeks.

“Aww, you want it back?”

“Give it back to her. Let’s leave the baby alone.” The shorter one recognized me. Maybe he thought I’d tell on him. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Or maybe he was a better kid than I imagined.

For some reason, the taller one did hand the bag back and they walked on past me, going toward the 7-Eleven. I was grateful for my classmate, but I was traumatized and fled to our apartment.

Once I calmed down enough to tell my parents what had just happened, they shot out the door in a flash. My sister and I stayed alone in the apartment probably less than ten minutes when Mother and Daddy returned. I could tell their adrenaline was pumping as they told us what happened.

It hadn’t taken long to find the boys, and they cornered them in the dark, dead-end alley behind the strip mall that included the 7-Eleven.

I can hear my dad say, “Are you two the little punks who stopped my daughter?”

The older boy pulled a knife. My dad pulled out his pocket knife and told him to drop it. He didn’t.

“We’re underage and you’d better not touch us.” Uh oh. Don’t ever tell Mother she’d better not do something. She told him she’d call the police herself, when it was all over.

My classmate called my mom a crazy b*tch and she showed him just how crazy she was. She picked up a pop bottle and shattered the bottom of it. She went toward him. He was up against the building when my mother grabbed the neck of his shirt with one hand and threatened to slice his jugular with the raised, jagged bottle.

The older one threw the knife down and they began begging to be let go. Both started apologizing, promising to never bother their girl again, and before they knew what hit them, my mother had that little one saying “Yes ma’am” to her before my parents told them to “Get the hell out of here and don’t come back!”

I was proudly embarrassed. My parents would never sit still for someone messing with their family, and I knew it. While they showed great restraint in not physically hurting those young thugs clad in black, their verbal violence and posturing were enough to send them running.

We didn’t stay in northern Illinois long after that. Between the violence my mother was convinced lurked around every corner and a medical issue my father was diagnosed with, we moved back to southern Illinois almost immediately. That, and the fact my mother had been notified she was to report for jury duty in the infamous Richard Speck trial. Speck had tortured and killed eight student nurses in a hospital housing complex the year before. Mother tried everything she knew, to get out of being selected. When religious objection to a probable death penalty case didn’t seem to make a difference, we high-tailed it out of the area and moved south. Cook County finally gave up on her after that, and she was struck from the jury pool.