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Where I Belong
Gina Boyd
Most children growing up in Mt. Pleasant are as used to the: “Where’s Dad?” “At the club,” call and response as they are to the “May the Lord be with you” “And also with you,” exchange at Mass each week. I sure did. The town, which in early years boomed around the coal and coke industry, used to boast three Catholic churches—an Italian one, a Slovak one, and a Polish one—each with its own K-8 school.
The Church calendar dictated the social calendars of most people and formed their senses of community. Each summer brought three church festivals, each taking a long weekend to raise money with pizza, pierogi and halushki, dunking booths, raffle tickets and the Cake Walk game, where you put a dime on a number and spun the wheel to win a cake. There was always live music and dancing—everyone loved a good polka.
Each fall brought a new school year and its attending bake sales, practices, and pageants. Each winter brought the children from all three schools to sing hymns and carols at the life-sized nativity in the center of town. Each spring saw troupes of celebrants parade through town on candlelit Easter vigils.
The schools ‘cafeterias served double duty as gym, auditorium, and church hall, which meant that the schools’ lights blazed nearly every night of the week with school activities, showers and socials, pizza sales and bingo. Bingo Nights were often the occasions where many children saw for the first time that old ladies would yell at people other than their grandchildren, and that priests and nuns were allowed to smoke cigarettes.
I loved going to Wednesday Night Bingo at St. Pius when I was in middle school. The really little kids—the toddlers and elementary school-aged kids—didn’t like it all, though, because they hated hearing, “Sit down there and behave,” and “Just a little while longer,” and “Damnit! I’m busy,” as their mothers tried to win enough money to make a contribution to the household.
We knew just how serious bingo was. It was disguised as a weekly social outing for the ladies of the church, but bingo was as cutthroat as any poker game; these women needed the cash. This was evident in the relative hostility with which newcomers were met. A new parishioner was fine and allowed to take her rightful place as one of the ladies of the church. An outsider, however, who might just stop in for fun, was not at all welcome. She and her friends were doing nothing less than screwing up the odds for the regulars.
The little kids knew their places and kept to a position on the green and white squares of the cafeteria’s floor tiles, getting dirty and avoiding nervous feet and the scraping legs of folding chairs, even after the supplies of snacks and waxy paper cups filled with lukewarm Pepsi were depleted. They colored, made designs on the backs of paper with extra tubes of bingo ink, and created towers and collages and even spy glasses out of transparent red, blue and green bingo chips, survived.
The big kids like me, though—mostly nine to twelve-year-old bands of Jennifers and Jills, Kathys and Kellys—did more than just survive the Wednesday nights. We honed our blossoming bingo skills. Our mothers and grandmothers let us more mature girls start out watching a bingo card or two of the up to twenty the practiced grand dames usually kept at one time. We reveled in our “babysitting” responsibility as we were finally, finally, allowed to put the chips and markers to their intended use. There were few sounds sweeter than Father Matt’s voice calling, “N-27.” Winning wasn’t necessary to the girls; anyone who got to shout “Bingo!” was often timid about it. It may have been the string of expletives that followed every call, or the pairs of disappointed eyes that girls didn’t like to see turned in their directions that caused the hesitation. The steady pleasure of watching over the cards and placing the chips or daubs of ink just so in their squares—just for the chance to win—was satisfaction enough.
Some girls brought good luck charms, from the traditional rabbit’s foot, to special hair barrettes, to photos of pets in sticker-adorned frames. They used their trinkets to set up mini-tableaux that mimicked, consciously or not, their mothers’ and grandmothers’ bingo areas, arranged with ashtrays, lucky lighters, cigarette packs, and lucky coffee cups. I never felt like I had anything especially lucky, but I often pulled out notes my friends at school had written to me during the day.
Mt. Pleasant hasn’t been able to support three parishes for more than five years; the Italian church, St. Pius X, is now the sole place to attend mass. Pius was built in the 1980s, the last time there was any money in the town, and the architecture and design are true to that period. Squat and modern, with orange carpeting and low pews, it could as easily be a dental office as a church. The older, more traditional churches cost too much to be maintained; one has already been demolished. There are no longer any parochial schools at all.
As the number of churches decreased, the number of private social clubs in Mt. Pleasant grew: Assunta, Bridgeport Sportsmen’s, Citizen’s, Hecla Sportsmen’s, Sons of Columbus, Elks, Kecksburg Firemen’s, Kosciuszko, Polish Falcons, American Legion, Laurelville Sportsmen’s, Volunteer Firemen’s.
The clubs were established with congregation and heritage in mind. Assunta and Sons of Columbus lean toward a more Italian membership; Kosciuszko (“Koochie’s”) and Polish Falcons tend to have more Polish members. The sportsmen’s clubs have no distinct ethnic feel, but all share a similar atmosphere. There’s a constant haze of cigarette smoke that seems to fall from the ceiling, rather to rise toward it. The walls and chair backs—any surfaces not regularly wiped off like the bar tops and tables are—sport a film of yellow and years.
The seats are red in some clubs and green in others, and sometimes the bar stools spin the whole way around, but most if not all of the chairs and stools are covered in cracked vinyl and have duct tape preventing yellow foam padding from escaping. Invariably, there is a jukebox that offers classic rock and country favorites. Most town natives, whether fans of country and western or not, can sing complete renditions of Hank Williams’s “There’s a Tear in my Beer.”
These clubs offer places for men to escape their wives and jobs and drink cheap pitchers of cheap beer and cheap shots of cheap whiskey; cheap cigarettes slumped in the cheap aluminum ashtrays. The Marlboro Man has become too expensive for the smokers of the region, unless the name brand cigarettes can be bought in bulk by an “ex-pat” who lives in a state with a lesser tax. This is a big deal, because while the ethics of buying contraband cigarettes are important to these church-goers, smoking is important too; these are a people among whom it is common to see the bridal party smoking at the head table between courses at a wedding. Women are permitted into the clubs as cooks and bar maids or as invited guests who must sign in, but are not allowed to be members. Inside club buildings, women seem to accept that they have a particular role.
I remember feeling terribly adult the first time my boyfriend picked me up to take me to the Polish Falcons during a Thanksgiving break spent home from college. He was driving his dad’s pick-up, and I thought about being a grown up in Mt. Pleasant, about how I could easily marry my boyfriend when we’d both finished college. That I would get a teaching job, and he would be an engineer and would probably have to get a job in Pittsburgh to make decent money, but that we’d live in Mt. Pleasant so our children would grow up with their extended families as we had.
I thought about how my boyfriend would eventually have his own pick-up truck with a bench seat. And a bed-liner. And a cap on the back. Just like his dad’s. Just like my dad’s.
We parked in the club’s freshly paved lot, and my boyfriend used his new membership to sign me in. I’d never been to Falcon’s at night, only for showers on Sunday afternoons, but the atmosphere was familiar. The darkness, the big bar, the televisions and tables and smaller room were all present, just in slightly different places. The look and smells were just the same as they were at my dad’s sportsman clubs, my grandfather’s Sons of Columbus, and the American Legion, where I’d been once when I won a citizenship award in the eighth grade.
There weren’t any other women around, so I was briefly interesting to the men at the bar. My boyfriend took a bit of teasing about his “ball and chain,” and then I was quizzed as to who my family was. Once I was put into context, and it was established that my grandfather’s cousin married so-and-so’s niece, I was a junior at Pitt, and that I’d been a cheerleader the year the high school football team won the W.P.I.A.L. championship at Three Rivers Stadium, I had a shot of whiskey and a beer and was accepted.
Being accepted as a woman who fits in at the club means being silent. No one had anything else to say to me, and I didn’t care to join in the discussion about the championship football team. My boyfriend was in on the talking, and he hadn’t even played high school football.
I used the bathroom, and noted by the layer of dust along the top of the roll of toilet paper that the ladies’ room wasn’t often occupied. I returned to my place at the bar and rocked my barstool gently from left to right, feeling just as I felt as a bored child waiting for my father to finish his drink. I smoked a few cigarettes to squash the child away, staring at the silent television until my best friend and college roommate showed up with my boyfriend’s best friend.
The four of us carried pitchers of beer away from the bar so we could play pool and darts in the company of the jukebox. I sat across from my roommate, and we tried to talk about school while the guys chose music and racked up pool balls, but we didn’t get far. The conversation just seemed wrong; we couldn’t talk about organic chemistry and women’s studies as the jukebox blared Deep Purple and the pool balls cracked against one another.
We smoked. She and I joined the next pool game, but we still didn’t talk much. The guys sang along with the music, and I didn’t correct my boyfriend as he mangled the lyrics. I avoided looking at him as he got drunk. He cheered for Bocephus’s Rowdy Friends. He’d begun to dance, which meant that he’d begun to lift his arms above his head, which pulled up his shirt, which meant his third-year-of-college beer belly was exposed.
His ever-present crucifix, a Confirmation gift from his parents, looked both at home and out of place as it hung around his neck from its gold chain. I wondered what Jesus would make of the situation, swinging back and forth just above that belly.
I wondered how soon it would be okay to leave. I wondered if my roommate and I could walk to her parents’ house and get a car, and even as I hatched the plan in my head I realized I’d never follow it through. My boyfriend would be furious, and he was too drunk to be allowed to drive himself.
So I sat across the table from my roommate, and we shared the ashtray as well as a sense of the wasted evening. We yawned, but I knew it would be pointless to try to get my boyfriend to leave the club until he’d thrown up at least once.
I ended things with that boyfriend, but I did marry someone from Mt. Pleasant. When it came to be time for my own bridal shower, I learned that I wasn’t a very good bride to begin with. I wanted very much to get married and to be my soon-to-be husband’s wife, but I wasn’t very interested in the wedding itself. My mother called me the Anti-Bride, and not fondly.
The June sunshine burned bright as I donned what I hoped would appear to be a sophisticated outfit, which was in fact the finest good Catholic girl outfit I could pull together. I cursed the panty hose that were already beginning to collect sweat as I climbed the stairs to the Sons of Columbus’s social hall. There was no air conditioning. Bulbs from the overhead fans, as well as the sunlight that filtered through the dirty windows, lighted the room. The requisite aluminum ashtrays were everywhere, something, at least, I could feel thankful for as I lit up and sized up the room in which I would be formally presented to my family, my fiancé’s family, and Mt. Pleasant society-at-large as someone worth marrying.
My mother’s best friend scurried around the room, directing the girls to line up the folding tables and get busy with placing the white paper tablecloths and taping them into place. The wedding colors were navy and cream, but streamers, accordion-style wedding bells, and other crepe paper items weren’t readily available in cream. Everything was draped in navy and white, lending a nautical air to the hot, dry room.
My mother fretted over whether the icing on the shower cake would hold up to the heat while my sister, the nineteen-year-old maid of honor, placed packets of shower games at each place, making sure the white and navy ribbon bindings faced the plastic forks on the right. Kathy, my mother’s friend, unpacked her prized contribution to the afternoon. This was the second run of her creation, adjusted slightly from the prototype used at her eldest son’s wedding two years before. The oversized wooden mail box, complete with hinged door and movable flag, was adorned with a batted layer of cream and navy cross-stitching, and edged with lace. There were wedding bells, of course, and hearts and doves, stitched around the names of the bride and groom. The mailbox was placed on the gift table as a repository for greeting cards, and would carry out the same mission at the wedding reception in a month.
Coffee brewed in the scratched metal urn, and trays of chips and pretzels were set along the tables with precision. Kathy’s daughter completed the table setting by sprinkling a layer of wedding bell confetti down the centers.
I slipped into the bathroom and longed for my fiancé, the day’s end, and more deodorant. I settled for a cigarette, noting the marks my pink lipstick left on the filtered end, and meandered to my seat at the head table to await the time when I would have to be the center of attention.
My mother shrieked when she saw the cigarette. “Put that out now,” she shouted. “You can’t have cigarettes burning up here! Think of Aunt Edna’s oxygen!”
Soon, the guests arrived and there was smiling and hugging and, “Oh, you’ve gotten so thin!” Relatives and friends formed their cliques and took seats as near to the head table as possible.
I introduced my mother and three bridesmaids to those who didn’t already know them, and then sat back to watch the attendants administer the games. The ladies hushed and bent over their packets to unscramble words and phrases like Honeymoon and Happily Ever After as my sister kept an eye on the time. She rang a bell after two minutes and looked sheepishly at me before chirping, “Okay, pencils down! I’ll read the answers, and if anyone gets them all right, please raise your hand.”
Several of the ladies, career bridal shower attendees, raised their hands and were greeted by two little cousins lugging a basket with small wrapped gifts for the victors to choose from. All eyes were on the prizes, and the packages of scented candles, picture frames, and kitchen utensils met with universal approval. If everyone knew the prizes had been collected during my mother’s careful trips to the dollar store, no one said a word.
Finally, all of the games were completed but one, and I was dreading Bridal Shower Bingo. The guests had filled in a bingo card included in their games packets with the names of gifts they thought I’d receive. They checked off the squares as those gifts were opened, and won Bingos until either the shower gifts or the game prizes ran out. I heard whispers of, “I got her a crock pot, so make sure you write that down,” and, “I got her a set of mixing bowls, so there’s a freebie.”
Now that I’m divorced, I don’t go back to Mt. Pleasant very much. My parents and grandparents are still there, so my son and I visit them, but I don’t go anywhere else. I don’t want to go back to the clubs and hang out with the people I grew up with. I don’t want the people I used to know to see me in anything but a state of triumph, and I’m not feeling very triumphant now that my marriage has failed. Many of theirs haven’t survived either, but I had always considered that I’d made better choices in all aspects of my life than the people who’d stayed in town.
I still believe that, I guess, but I don’t want to go there and find that I fit in. I don’t want to go there and feel at home in a place that doesn’t offer much more than silence to the women who live there, and football to their sons. I also don’t want to go there and see my old school boarded up and dormant. I don’t want to go to St. Pius with my parents and see the new priest, or hear the organist that was imported from one of the other churches.
If I go to Easter vigil this year, I’m pretty sure it will be in the city. It’s where I hope I belong.
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