Sample

Someone I’ve kept from the dawn of time is my best friend, Meghan Sue Reilly. We grew up together in a working-class neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Chicago. Meg’s parents moved to Chicago from Ireland and settled into the thriving Irish and Polish community known as Rivercrest. At that time, the residents of Rivercrest subsisted on work in slaughterhouses, primarily for pigs, and steel plants. It was the early 1980s and open discrimination against the Irish was not too distant a memory. Our grandparents would speak of newspaper advertisements offering employment that would note “Irish Need Not Apply.”

(How things have changed; now the descendants of Irish immigrants are running political machines in Chicago and true to human nature, society has identified other groups of people to pick on.)

That antiIrish mindset was alive and well when Nora Tonrah and Samuel Reilly immigrated to America. Meg’s parents arrived separately, but just in time to participate in America’s entre to World War II. All too soon after he arrived in Chicago, eighteen-year-old Samuel Reilly found himself on a boat back to Europe, where he served with the Allied forces that liberated Luxembourg in early 1945. Samuel was a member of the infantry that was ultimately victorious in the Battle of the Bulge. An admirable, but brief, service for his new country and he was honorably discharged as a Private First Class.

I’m still amazed that one of my friends had parents old enough to participate in World War II. Sure, Meg and I have plenty of classmates whose fathers and in one case, a mother, went to Korea or Vietnam. But her dad Samuel fought in World War II. That was a long time ago. To this day, Meg has a picture of her dad in uniform. It’s a black and white photograph, but hand-dusted with color to give a rosy glow to his cheeks and make the gray of his uniform look green. Even when we were young girls, I knew that this was remarkable, perhaps because Meg’s parents were old.

It was many years after the war when Nora met Sam in a dentist’s office where she was the receptionist. Then in their midthirties, they forged a relationship that had all the trappings of a dysfunctional midcentury marriage, complete with cigarettes, martinis, moodiness, extended silences, financial stress, emotional abuse, and the pressure to assimilate to the culture of a bustling industrial city in the United States.

Meg was born when Nora and Sam were in their forties, which was rare indeed, in 1972. She was the only child produced by that horrific marriage. I’ve heard (tongue in cheek) that there are over one hundred ways to destroy a child, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t try eighty-seven of them. Meg’s parents volleyed back and forth between outrageous neglect and irrational demands. She would go for weeks without adequate food. And just when she was convinced that her parents didn’t notice or care about her, they would target Meg with laser focus, demanding that she contribute to household duties or improve her school performance or make less noise or provide the solution to the undefined problem of their communal unhappiness. In short, they treated her like the roommate they never wanted but were forced to keep.

Meg would have to persevere through all this disadvantage on the journey of growing from a child to a successful professional woman. It astounds me to consider her resilience and ability to flourish amid adversity. Meg was destined to end up on one of two roads, with no middle ground: she could repeat her parents’ cycle and spin at the bottom of life’s barrel for all her days, or through sheer grit, courage, work, and tenacity, she could rise through the thick fluid in that barrel.

***

Meg and I met before we started elementary school, when the Reillys moved into the top floor of a vertical four-flat brick apartment building that was right next door to our little house.

My family lived in a small brick bungalow, which was (and still is) quintessential Chicago working-class housing. Built in the 1930s, our three-bedroom home was simple and starting to show its half-century age. The small rooms were packed with furniture, but very little in the way of knickknacks. We ate in the kitchen, huddled around a rectangular Formica table, laminated in white with flecks of gold. The table had a band of silver metal around its edge that always reminded me of the chrome on a car. The vinyl cushion on my chair had four small holes, where I pushed the tines of a fork through it. For many years, those holes reminded me of the spanking that followed.