Chapter 9
NINE
ABBEY
On my day off a couple of weeks later, which happens to be payday, I bring my grandmother lunch from Rooted Market.
Glamma loves their roast beef sandwiches, and I splurge on a cranberry turkey melt with fries and the cheapest autumn-inspired bouquet they have, mostly orange and yellow carnations and a lot of baby’s breath.
Not bad for under five bucks. Glamma will slip me a couple of twenties on my way out, anyway, which I’ll use to pay down my emergency credit card.
I also buy three copies of psycho logic—one for Glamma, one for my parents, and one for my portfolio.
For this issue, I interviewed a local feminist playwright and wrote an homage to Coya Knutson, the first female Minnesotan elected to Congress, who died last week.
Writing for the zine has been a balm to my soul.
I just wish Hal could pay me more. My checking account balance is dwindling, and I’ve gotten no responses to the resumes I’ve mailed to every newspaper in the Twin Cities metro, including TC Weekly’s top competitor, Squall.
I’ve even sent resumes to advertising agencies—talk about selling out.
As much as I like my job at Hometown, I wish things had worked out differently at TC Weekly.
The image of Ryan’s smug face comes rushing back, the feeling of his fingers on my skin—
I shudder. No. I will not think about that. I shove it back in the dark, dusty corner of my mind where it belongs.
It’s almost the twenty-first century. Men should be capable of treating women with respect. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would be so disappointed. And what’s wrong with me that I couldn’t find the words to tell off Ryan or even Tyrell in the moment?
Glamma and I eat at the table in the sunroom to catch the warm autumn rays, a Doris Day record playing quietly from Papa’s turntable in the opposite corner of the room.
Glamma is easily my favorite person on the planet.
She lives next door to my parents in a perfectly preserved mid-century ranch house.
She’s Dad’s mother, who married and buried two husbands.
She bought the house next door for my parents with the money she’d inherited and invested after her first husband, Dad’s father, died in a car accident.
Her second husband, my Papa, died a year ago of lung cancer, but that hasn’t stopped Glamma from smoking her Virginia Slims, no ma’am.
With her boxed red hair and costume jewelry, she reminds me a little of Endora from Bewitched, and—as she’s fond of saying—she doesn’t give a flying fig about what anyone thinks of her.
Today, as every day, she’s glammed up with false eyelashes and rhinestone clips in her hair. She’s wearing a forest-green A-line dress with a black patent belt at her trim waist and giant black buttons on the bodice.
“I’m excited to read your articles,” Glamma says as she pours us both a glass of iced tea, “but first, how’s your new job?”
“It’s good.” I take a sip. Glamma loves a bargain, and she stocks up whenever the big canisters of Lipton are on sale.
The sweet, lemon flavor is the comforting taste of all my summers growing up.
If I’m lucky, the massive amount of sugar will somehow help alleviate the tension headache that’s lingered since…
well, since I found out about Wil Wilshire being Wil Wilshire.
“It’s so different from the newspaper, but oddly enough, I like it a lot. ”
“Oh, I don’t know what’s so odd about it. That job seems right up your alley, and I’m sure you’ve met some very interesting people. You get your love of music from me, you know.” She winks. She’s loved me like a real granddaughter since the moment she met me.
Before Glamma married Ray, her first husband, she was a singer on a post-war radio show in Chicago—Oliver Fletcher & His Swingin’ Singers & Orchestra.
Glamma sang Broadway tunes and Ollie Fletcher originals with five male singers, backed by a big band orchestra.
In all the photos, she wears gorgeous dresses, sparkling jewelry, high heels, and her trademark flirty smile.
My new gig at Hometown is the opposite of her glamorous radio career. But I fill her in on the job and how my body is finally adjusting to my weird retail sleep schedule.
“So,” she says, “tell me what really happened at TC Weekly.”
I nearly choke on the fry I’m chewing. “What?”
Glamma raises her painted-on eyebrows. “Maybe my obtuse son and his slightly less obtuse wife—no offense to your mother, of course—can’t see there’s something fishy about you suddenly losing your job, but I’ve got a hunch.”
“Mmhmm,” I say around another mouthful. I chew and swallow. “Layoffs happen all the time, Glamma, in every industry.”
“Funny, then, how that very morning, your mother was over here bragging about how you were meeting with your new editor about a promotion, but the next day, she called to tell me your current position had been eliminated instead. Now, I know I’ve been out of the workforce for quite some time, but wouldn’t it make more sense to promote you and then simply not hire someone for your previous role? ”
My mouth falls open a little and I blink a few times. “That would have made sense, yes.” I force an awkward half-laugh. “Not everything they do at TC Weekly makes sense.”
Glamma purses her lips. “Still, I suspect there’s something you’re not telling me.” She takes a sip of iced tea. “Either you were never up for that promotion, or something happened in that meeting. And I can’t imagine why you would fabricate the potential of a promotion.”
I shrug and look toward Papa’s console record player. The music has stopped, so I get up to flip the record, and Doris Day’s distinctive voice and the bossa nova rhythms of “Desafinado” fill the room.
When I return to the table, Glamma says, “Did I ever tell you why I left the Oliver Fletcher orchestra?”
“You met Ray, right, and moved to Minneapolis?”
She nods. “Well, I moved back, yes. I didn’t meet Ray until after that.”
This is a surprise. I always thought that she’d left her radio career for love. “Why did you leave?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard the term casting couch.” She dabs at the corners of her lips with a monogrammed linen napkin.
My hand flies up to cover my mouth. My senior capstone project was an investigation into sexism during the golden age of Hollywood and the mostly unknown women who fought against it. Unknown because their careers ended when they didn’t acquiesce to the manipulation and sexual harassment.
The beast in the pit of my stomach stirs, the monster who’s been mostly quiet since I tucked away the memory of that day in Ryan’s office, and a wave of nausea comes over me. Did Glamma experience sexual harassment—or worse?
She reaches across the table and grabs my hand. Her soft, papery skin is warm and comforting. “Now, now, don’t you fret.”
“What happened?” I ask, my eyes wide.
“Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, being the only woman in a chorus had its challenges, and there were only three or four women in the orchestra at the time as well.
For the most part, the men were respectful and acted with the utmost decorum.
Oliver Fletcher was a man of honor, you see, and high expectations.
One of the musicians got arrested for public drunkenness, and after Ollie bailed him out, he fired him.
There was no room for any sort of scandal or inappropriate behavior. ”
She releases my hand and starts gathering up our dishes. Glamma has a hard time sitting still. “I’ll bring in dessert. This story calls for cake. Sit tight.”
She returns a few minutes later with a tray of coffee and homemade angel food cake with lemon curd drizzle, my favorite, although I’m not sure I can stomach it. I take a small sip of coffee.
“We rehearsed a couple of times a week,” she says, “and we had the radio show on Saturday nights. I shared an apartment with one of the gals from the orchestra, and we’d always travel to and from the studio together. She was a doll, that Peg Cavanaugh, such a talented musician.
“I’d been with the chorus about three years when Oliver Fletcher got sick,” she continues. “It came as quite a shock. The man didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, never had a cold. He simply collapsed one day at rehearsal, and the next we heard, he was scheduled for surgery and would miss six weeks.”
“What was wrong with him?” I ask.
“Well, I never found out, to be honest.”
“Didn’t he tell you when he came back?”
“I wasn’t there when he came back. I’d left the group.”
“Why?”
“Ollie didn’t want people to know what was happening with his health, especially the folks at the radio show.
He downplayed the illness, didn’t tell anyone at the station about the surgery, and asked his brother to fill in during his convalescence.
They weren’t twins, but they might have been, what with how similar they looked, and the voice!
It was uncanny how they sounded exactly the same.
“Now, we could have gotten by without a conductor, certainly, but part of the charm of the show was Ollie’s on-air personality, the stories he told, the banter between him and the musicians.
All scripted, of course. So, Eli Fletcher stepped in and read from the script that Ollie wrote from his hospital bed, and no one knew. ”
“But?”
She takes a bite of cake and looks off into the distance. “Gosh, I haven’t thought about those days in quite some time.” She turns to look at me. “But Eli did not have the same moral compass, shall we say, as his brother.”
I cringe, and another wave of unease comes over me. “Is this where the casting couch comes in?”
She nods. “I mentioned that it wasn’t always easy being one of the only females in the performance space, especially when it was only the chorus rehearsing.
Me and five men, and Ollie, usually. Only once did one of them make a suggestive comment, and Oliver told him he’d be out of a job if it happened again.
But Eli, on the other hand, somehow created a number of opportunities to get me alone. ”
Glamma pauses and places her index finger against her closed lips, and I swear I see them tremble.
“It started out as seemingly innocent comments, sometimes in front of others, sometimes when he caught me by myself,” she continues.
“But the comments made me uncomfortable, and I would find any excuse to remove myself from the situation. One day, about a month into Oliver’s absence, the situation devolved, you might say.
He threatened me—basically told me if I didn’t—well—sleep with him, he’d tell Ollie I’d been with all the men in the chorus and get me fired.
I told him I’d like to see him try. And then, the minute Eli Fletcher put his hands on me, I walked out of that rehearsal space and never went back. ”
“Did he—did he—hurt you?” I can’t say more than that.
She shakes her head. “No. I stomped on his foot with my high heel, and he let go of me. I ran out of there as quickly as I could.”
I take Glamma’s hand and squeeze it. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t know, sweetheart. I never told anyone except Peg, and I swore her to secrecy. Not Ray, not even Papa. That sort of thing wasn’t talked about.”
Still isn’t, I think.
“But what happened when Oliver came back?” I ask. “Didn’t he wonder why you’d left the chorus?”
“I’d already moved back home by then. Eli told him one story, Peg told him another. Who was he going to believe?”
“Peg stood up for you?”
“She did. But things were never quite the same for her after that. She left the orchestra a few weeks later.”
“She was a good friend,” I say. I wonder what I would do in her situation, if I would be able to stand up for a friend when I can’t even stand up for myself.
My heart aches for those two young women. Back then, there weren’t many options for women in the entertainment industry, not to mention the inequality in every other industry.
As if she can read my mind, Glamma says, “My options were limited, but as a young, single woman, I needed to work. So, after I moved home, I took a job as a secretary at my uncle’s factory. That’s how I met Ray. Everything worked out in the end, and I believe that it will for you, too, love.”
I massage two fingers against my temple in a fight against the headache.
I need more coffee. Coffee will help—with the stubborn headache, with the hollow ache in my chest when I think about Ryan and Eli and Carina and all the women who have found themselves in this kind of position.
Especially Glamma. My beautiful, kindhearted, fabulous Glamma.
She smiles and pats my hand. Her skin is dotted with brown age spots, the veins pronounced.
I look up from our hands to her kind eyes and feel the hot rush of tears and a lump in my throat.
Since I was four years old, Glamma has been my person, the one I turn to at every stage, every celebration, every heartbreak.
“Darling girl,” she says quietly, “I understand if you don’t want to tell me what really happened the day you lost your job. I hope that one day, you’ll feel differently. But know that I am always here for you, no matter what.”
When Glamma hugs me goodbye, I breathe in her familiar, soft lilac scent and hold on tight. She sends me home with a container of angel food cake and chocolate chip cookies with walnuts, and two twenties slipped into my coat pocket.