When I was 16, I wrote a short story about a house where I used to hang out near my middle school in a working-class neighborhood in Minneapolis. The house belonged to the Savage family, an apt name, a family of three rowdy boys headed by two alcoholics living in a disheveled home where rules did not apply. The short story I wrote was a mix of autobiography and magic realism.
I am not sure if I wrote the story for an English assignment or just for myself, but in any event, it has been lost to history. I thought of it recently and wondered if I could recreate it, not in the voice of an impressionable teenager but my voice now, as a 73-year-old East Coast artist and grandmother.
My original story began by describing how my girlfriend and I — both 14 — were enamored with the “bad boys” who frequented the Savage house, boys a bit older than we were and known to be wild. We would walk in front of the house a few times until one of the boys would lean out and yell, “Hey girls, come on in.” Once inside, we sat on a partially collapsed couch and became the audience for their antics, which, due to the amount of beer being consumed, seemed completely hilarious to all of us.
We were tolerated at first like annoying little sisters, and we felt cool to have been admitted to this inner sanctum. Both my girlfriend and I came from large Catholic families, and this was the 1960s; there were no helicopter parents then and our whereabouts were often unknown to our families. We were, in many ways, like feral children.
The boys’ mother was called Grace Savage, also an apt name. She was a broken, unhappy woman, but there was a tenderness about her. The kitchen was her domain; she’d always be seated at the Formica table, smoking, a mountain of cigarette butts in an ashtray before her and a drink in her hand.
The epitome of permissiveness, Grace was nice to us and made sure there was always toilet paper in the bathroom. She also helped us if we needed to get into the refrigerator because the handle was broken and it required a screwdriver to be jammed into the handle slot and a kick on the bottom of the door to open. Grace held court in the kitchen every day, her presence made known by the vicious coughing fits that erupted from her at frequent intervals.
Her husband was rumored to have a girlfriend who worked at the local bar, and he was rarely home. We were always there, though, laughing and drinking in the living room. One particularly hysterical moment happened while watching a performance by Mark, one of the boys I liked best. He was tall and lanky, and even then I could tell he was the intelligent one of the group. He read literature and once remarked how much he liked the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder. I remember thinking at the time it was rather strange that he liked something I considered to be sentimental.
One day, someone brought in a Moody Blues album and when it started to play, Mark jumped up and did an improvised ballet while we all cracked up. Unbeknownst to him, we were really laughing so hard because we noticed a burning ash had fallen onto his sock, so we watched him continue to dance until he felt the hot foot we all knew was coming.
Only once did we see Grace break from her kitchen stupor, on an afternoon when she had finally had enough of our slovenly behavior. She erupted at all of us, storming through the living room while wildly jerking a vacuum cleaner back and forth yelling, “I’m sick of all this mess!”
All these details — the refrigerator, the Moody Blues ballet, the vacuum cleaner — were described in my original story, and I then gave the story a fantastical ending.
It went like this: One day someone brought in the Beatles’ White Album and the talk was that if you played one song backward, you’d hear the words “Paul is dead.” I embellished this rumor, saying that Paul wasn’t really dead but alive on a secret island called Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club. Grace was listening wide-eyed as I explained it all. I went on to say it was a place only special people could go, people whose lives had been lonely and hard, and who then got to live out their days in a paradise of love and community.
The following day we went into the kitchen, and Grace was gone, her cigarette left smoldering in the ashtray. We heard a whirling outside and when we went into the backyard to investigate we saw a helicopter disappearing into the clouds. We realized Grace had been chosen along with the other lonely people to join Paul on the secret island paradise.
Of course, that is not how the story ended in real life — there was no saving Grace. I stopped hanging out at the house when my family moved away to a different neighborhood and I eventually moved to New York for art school. I think I heard that one of the Savage brothers went to Vietnam and was later arrested for drug dealing, but I lost track of the others. Grace and her husband are long gone, and maybe many of the “bad boys” as well.
I am not sure why I even remembered this story now, nor why I had given it a magical ending back then. Perhaps I had been looking for a magical ending to my own family’s story, impacted by alcoholism. Or perhaps I was fantasizing about my own escape.
After going to graduate school at Pratt in the ’70s, I got married, quit drinking, and moved to Springs, where I’ve now lived for over four decades. Here, I’ve worked as a curator and teacher, raised a daughter, and made art. Springs is not exactly the Grover’s Corners of Wilder’s “Our Town,” nor is it paradise island exactly, but it has — at least for me — become a place of love and community. And Paul McCartney has a house nearby.
Jennifer Cross is a painter living in Springs. A solo exhibition of her work will be on view at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Sag Harbor from Nov. 15 to Dec. 15.