Susan Arenella

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL

(POST 11)

May 31, 1981 - Today, I write Joe a five-page double-sided letter using up the last of another box of stationery. The drama with Joe’s father continues. After I refuse to meet him in Boston alone for dinner, he offers to take Jessica and me out for breakfast with his family. But, true to form, on that dreaded morning he stays home and sends his wife instead. Over pancakes, my future step-mother-in-law (let’s call her J) rails into me, trying to talk me out of the wedding.

“What a disaster,” I write to Joe. “J said she didn’t think our marriage would work because of the statistics that only one out of three marriages survive.”

Granted, Joe and I were young and dumb and had no idea what we were signing up for. But J’s unwarranted attack stunned me speechless in the restaurant. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to respond, because the criticisms and warnings were coming from a woman whose husband had abandoned his first family, a man who boasted to his son about his many girlfriends on the side, including the pregnant one outside Boston whom he proudly introduced to Joe.

Suddenly, Jessica, all five years and nine months of her, started spraying chocolate milk at J though a straw. When J told her to behave or we wouldn’t all go out again, Jessica snapped, “So what? I didn’t want to go out with you anyway.”

At the time, I was mortified. What mother wouldn’t be? I told Joe I later grounded Jessica for two days, though I’m not sure from what: Sesame Street? Mork and Mindy? She did love those shows.

Forty five years in, however, I can’t think of a better use for chocolate milk. Yes, Jessica was out of control that day, but why should a kid just sit there and allow her mother to be mistreated? I all but admit this in my letter.

“When you think about it,” I write to Joe regarding Jessica, “she was just more or less expressing her true feelings about the situation.”

Amen to that. If only I’d had the temerity to do the same.

Yes!

Happy Gilmore Girls season to all who celebrate🍂☂️☕

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL

(POST 10) May 27, 1981

Today, I write to Joe about his father’s latest antics.

I’d had my fair share of menacing male customers at Hair Talk, guys who’d walk in off the street when I was alone, who’d sidle up too close or glare into the mirror, un******ng me with their eyes. Creeps who’d back off after one skillful flip of my trusty straight edge razor, which I always kept nearby. "Need a shave?" I’d ask, in my Lawrence girl, take-no-sh*t kinda way.

But my future father-in-law poses a different kind of danger. A notorious womanizer, he threw his son out soon after we started dating, not due to my age (which he applauded, wink, wink) but because I dragged Joe to Bible studies. When Joe moved into a local family’s cellar, his father still tormented us. He even phoned me at midnight once, boasting he was in the Mafia, threatening to put a contract out on me and Jessica if I didn’t stop dating Joe. (Why I’d keep dating any guy after that, is beyond me.) Regardless, Gina’s husband Frank, a Louie Prima-type 60’s lounge singer, calmed me down. “Ah Suzie” he rasped, in his paternal, East Coast Italian way. “Guys in the Mafia don’t go around tellin’ people they’re in the Mafia.”

Still, I avoided Joe’s father until today, when he shows up at the shop to talk me into having a Catholic wedding. Purportedly. Then, he asks me out to dinner, suggesting I take a bus to Boston the following evening and meet him at 7. Somehow, I stayed cool, smartly replying I’d call him later, which I did.

“I told him it was against my principles to meet a married man in Boston,” I report to Joe. “He said fine, and I suggested that if he wanted to talk and discuss matters that I wouldn’t mind doing so when his family was present.”

Whew. Our young Sue might’ve been crazy in love and burning through rent money on a wedding she couldn’t afford, but her instincts were impeccable.

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL

May 26, 1981 (POST 9)

I am again penning a letter to Joe from the laundromat, because my washer is officially dead. “This laundromat stuff is for the birds,” I bemoan, because I’ve had another long day at the shop. Apparently, I’ve been so busy at Hair Talk lately that Donna (my shampoo girl) has to feed me my lunchtime bran muffin piece by piece as I stand at my chair churning out humdrum perms, wash and sets, and Dorothy Hamill wedges. So, my creative bright spot of the day merited an entire page in my letter, when Tommy, my friend and former shampoo boy, stopped in for a haircut.

“You should see the haircut I gave him,” I gush. “Really punk looking. He said Vidal Sassoon couldn’t have done as good a job. It was long in the back, punk on the top…and I gave him points in the front.”

Though the haircut came at a price, since Tommy had to endure my non-stop chatter about Joe. “He wanted to know if I was counting down the minutes. It was then that I informed him you had been gone for 28 days, 6 hours and 15 minutes.”

While I’m good with a ticking clock, my math on the wedding costs seems nowhere near as precise. I tell Joe I’ve bought material for the seamstress, so she can cover the buttons on Gina’s old wedding gown. And since my sister Kathy has purchased a maid of honor outfit, I’m hoping to find a flower girl dress for Jessica over the weekend, if I can talk a friend into carting us around. I also ordered wedding invitations and “called the caterer and made it a definite,” choosing the cheaper brunch menu for my wedding guests.

Since funds are lacking, I’m now tapping into my June rent money, with the half-baked idea that my landlord won’t notice (which he will), or if he does, that my situation will move him with pity (which it won’t).

In sum, our young Sue is running around town, racking up expenses, and honestly, she’s making me nervous. Her modus operandi seems to be “order now, worry later.” This shoe string wedding business is not for the faint of heart.

I was fifteen when she was born. I almost named her Harmony, a nod to an Elton John song. But my friend, Marie, advised against it. “Sounds great now,” Marie said, “but she’ll probably hate it when she grows up.” So instead, as my newborn slept in the bassinet next to us, Marie and I perused a book of baby names while sitting in my hospital room adjacent to the Boston maternity home where we’d been living all summer. Her name had to “mean something” we decided, so Marie went page by page, ticking off names and their meanings, until we came to the name Jessica, because it meant “strong one,” and because we both knew you had to be strong to survive in this world. Especially being female.

Today, Jessica Marie turns 50.

Happy Birthday, my sweet, hippie flower child. Again and again, I have watched you hold true to your name, tackling adversity with the strength of ten thousand suns. Again and again, you have proven Marie and me right.

Another great review of Law Moms in the July/August issue of the Houston Bar Association's journal. "In our profession, we are often seen as the problem solvers....Law Moms reminds us that it's okay not to be okay, and that vulnerability and imperfection are part of being human, even in the high stakes world of law."

Thanks, Houston Bar!

From my hometown’s History Center. From its start, Lawrence has always been a town built for and on the backs of immigrants.

The Lawrence Textile Strike was a public protest mainly of immigrant workers from several countries, including Austria, Belgium, Cuba, Canada, France, England, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Syria, and Turkey. According to the 1910 census, 65% of mill workers (many of whom eventually struck) lived in the United States for less than 10 years; 47% for less than five years.

Happy Labor Day from the Lawrence History Center! Be sure to head over to the Campagnone Common for the 41st Annual Bread & Roses Heritage Festival, 11:30 am - 6:00 pm.

"If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. As long as workers keep their hands in their pockets the capitalists cannot put theirs there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move they are more powerful than all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for protection and attack.”

~Joseph Ettor, Industrial Workers of the World organizer, January 13, 1912, speaking to workers in Lawrence, MA at the start of the Strike of 1912 (also known as Bread and Roses).

Take a moment to learn more about Lawrence's labor history here: https://dp.la/exhibitions/breadandroses

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL

POST 8- May 22, 1981

Today, I write my letter to Joe sickened from eating all the left over chocolate frosting from the birthday cake I baked. I had a hard day, I say, wherein “anything that could go wrong did, and anyone who could get on my nerves” descended all at once: an overbooked calendar, a tornado of difficult clients, an impromptu visit from the health inspector, all while standing at my chair, trying to keep up with the hair on the floor and the towels in the sink. My bad day culminates with a call from the seamstress about my wedding gown.

My boss Gina is loaning me her dress from a previous marriage. Her current mother-in-law recently found it in a corner of her mildewed cellar, stuffed into a trash bag. The gown was a mid-century beauty when Gina wore it in 1959: antique white, silk taffeta, boat neck with a v-back featuring a long row of covered buttons. Now, it was a crumpled mess. Moths had eaten the fabric off the buttons. But Gina said if I could repair and clean it, it was mine to wear. How could I say no? The price was right. It was this or the Goodwill. So, I said yes to the dress, sight unseen.

Yet now the seamstress can’t find taffeta; she might need to use fake pearl buttons. “I WANT COVERED BUTTONS,” I scream in my letter, in my post-chocolate stupor.

Often, I want to slap some sense into younger Sue. But not today. Because really, buttons are a small ask. Sue is an overworked, underpaid single mom who frets over her daughter’s strep throats and ear infections. Her washing machine is broken, her food stamps never last, and she fears Joe will change his mind about the wedding, that the life she’s imagined will simply disintegrate, much like the furniture in her apartment. But Sue will never admit this, nor will she mention the panic attacks waking her many nights, her heart jackhammering in her ears.

No, today, I want to hug Sue and tell her that Joe isn’t going to vanish. This time, her beau will be a keeper. And that forty-four years later, I’ll be amazed at her resilience, her determination to dream big and fight for those buttons, no matter what.

Reader: What, if you could, would you want to tell your younger self today?

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL

POST 7- May 20, 1981

After work on May 20th, Joe’s friends again show up unannounced. This time, best man, Joe G., brings future groomsmen, Louie and John. Purportedly, they’re here to help me plan the wedding. But while I make “important phone calls,” they play checkers. For two hours.

I was 17 when I moved into my apartment. I had endured many impromptu visits from friends who (wrongly) assumed my place could serve as their hang out. But surprise visitors have increased exponentially with Joe’s friends in the mix. Now, there’s an unending stream of people stopping by to “help” me.

My Joe was an affable guy who befriended almost everyone he ran into, including our groomsmen, whom he met a few months earlier when he picked them up hitchhiking. In his first years in Lawrence, Joe quickly became popular by “borrowing” his former employer’s box truck on hot summer evenings, packing in as many Stadium Project teens as he could, and carting them to Salisbury Beach. The Ace Foods delivery vehicle bore the inscription "Fresh Fish," so, for a time, Joe became the infamous Fish Truck Guy, a title that went up in flames along with the empty truck one night, as Joe was returning it to his employer’s lot (pro tip: don’t use an old rag for a gas cap).

But if my former Fish Truck Guy’s vast circle of friends is bothersome, I don’t let on in my letter. I have bigger problems. As Joe’s friends play checkers, I call Uncle Jackie, my deceased father’s brother, and ask him to give me away. “I explained the whole situation to him,” I write to Joe, “and he seemed to think my mother would come around in time.”

My mother is threatening to skip the wedding. She’s not opposed to Joe or the marriage. As a devout Catholic, she's thrilled her shamed daughter is finally marrying. But when I explain the wedding will not be Catholic, and that Father Bill (her brother, the priest) will not officiate, my mother, Father Bill, and my grandmother dig in their heels. And I’m digging in mine. So, amid my wedding plan insanity, I’m now at odds with the few family members who hadn't already disowned me for keeping my baby. I can only hope Uncle Jackie is right.

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL:

Post 6: MAY 19, 1981

By Joe’s third week in bootcamp, I’ve plowed through two boxes of stationery and have designated July 19th as the wedding date. In my letter, I acknowledge I’m rushing things, because Joe doesn’t graduate from bootcamp until July 17. But it all makes sense, I write, because this will allow us almost two weeks together before he leaves for desert training in Twentynine Palms.

“I will have everything taken care of,” I promise Joe. “All you have to do is get dressed, stand there, and say I do.”

Meanwhile, my washing machine is now on the blink, so I trudge to the laundromat with Jessica a few nights a week, lugging my trash bag of dirty clothes. I let nothing stop me from this task, even on May 19, when three of Joe’s friends show up unannounced. I somehow talk them into accompanying me, probably because they could drive us there.

“And who says Lawrence people don’t have any fun?” I write to Joe from the laundromat, then hand the pen to Joe G., the friend who’s been tapped to be Best Man in the wedding. “Man” is a stretch here because Joe G. is still in high school. Regardless, Joe G. writes how he’s “helping Sue with the wedding,” followed by a thorough recounting of his recent prom.

As I read this today, everything inside me wants to slap Sue upside the head, then lock her in a closet until she realizes that a guy young enough to be attending a prom should not be preparing for his best friend’s wedding, much less should his best friend be getting married. But Sue seems oblivious to this, which makes no sense, because Sue was no Pollyanna. Her life circumstances alone make this obvious. Yet, in her letter, she follows Joe G.’s note with a mad jumble of what needs to be done in two months’ time—dresses, invitations, photography, cake—with no concern as to how she’ll pay for any of it.

In some ways though, I have to admire Sue, her vision, her positivity, her unwavering belief that this wedding will happen exactly the way she wants it to, despite all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps it’s because she has nothing to lose. Maybe when you’re starting from the bottom, there’s nowhere to look but up.

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL

POST 5 - May 15, 1981

“Hi. I love you and I hope you had a nice day (if you know what I mean.)”

By now, Joe has warned me to not mention his birthday, because this will invite extra pushups and all manner of unnecessary bootcamp torture. Instead, I offer this cryptic note, to celebrate his eighteenth birthday.

Eighteen. What the hell was Sue thinking?

I met Joe ten months earlier, at the height of what I’ll call my “zealous phase,” the years in which I traded in my wilder days for coffeehouse Bible studies with a crowd of wide-eyed, guitar-schlepping younger folks, who, like me, harbored a deep distrust of organized religion.

So, dating Joe —let alone marrying him—was the furthest thing from my mind when he first stomped into Hair Talk Salon with that Easy Rider look that never appealed to me: mustache, beard, leather jacket, engineer boots. But he did have a long, unruly mane a stylist could really sink her scissors into, a mop that took forty-five minutes to tame into a Vinnie Barbarino special. Joe talked incessantly that day. I could’ve aced a quiz on the story of his life by the time I finished. The only answer I would not have nailed was his age.

Joe liked The Cars and Blondie. He drove a sleek, maroon ‘67 Buick Elektra with a “really sweet” undermount eight-track player. He lived in Lawrence now but had grown up in the projects outside Boston, a childhood involving motorcycles, expulsions and alternative schools. By fifteen he was on his own, searching for the father who’d left when he was five. He eventually found him, in Lawrence, with family number two. Joe worked two jobs now: in a hardware store, and at a shoe factory in one of the barely-occupied mills.

Age aside, if Joe was my type, his baggage alone would’ve sent me running. My bad boy days were over. However, I was a sucker for lost souls back then. So, I scrawled my number on the back of a Hair Talk card and invited Joe to church. He declined, of course, because he was headed to the White Mountains that weekend to party with friends. But when Joe’s plans fell through, shockingly, he called me.

Who knew that a lowly business card could wield such power?

LETTERS FROM A LAWRENCE GIRL:

Post 4 | May 10, 1981

After I send seven frantic letters into the silent void, Joe’s first reply is waiting for me when I get home from work. I am jubilant, of course. But in hindsight, I sense some unease in Sue.

“It’s a funny feeling to know you’re moving on,” I write in my letter.

Mind you, all I really know at this point is that Marine Corp bootcamp hasn’t yet killed my boyfriend. We have no idea where he’ll be stationed, and we still haven’t decided if Jessica and I will actually leave Lawrence and follow him to this unknown location. And although I’m supposedly planning our wedding for July, we don’t, as yet, have the date nailed down.

Regardless, I write this sentence like a girl who’s already packed up and ready to go. Granted, a lot is in flux, because on top of my slap dash nuptials, the neighborhood salon where I’ve worked for almost five years—HairTalk—is about to be sold. My boss, Gina, is entertaining offers and I am now managing the shop alone. I complain to Joe that in between cuts and colors and perms, potential buyers are buzzing around HairTalk at inconvenient hours, asking questions. I seem overly certain that whoever buys the shop will need me to work there, like I’m trying to convince myself my job won’t soon be on the chopping block.

Meanwhile, the furniture in my attic apartment is disintegrating, like it already knows I’m leaving.

“You know my kitchen chair,” I write, “the one that’s all bent? I just sat down in it and the back fell all the way off.”

A few letters later, my washing machine will break, and the springs in my couch will snap; its cushions will sink through to the living room floor. Year five appears to be its cutoff.

I had moved into my apartment in 1977—months after graduating from Capilo’s School of Hair Design—with nothing but Jessica’s crib, my desk, my stereo, my prized vinyl collection, and a trash bag full of clothes. At the time, I’d saved $500: combined earnings from shampoo-girl gigs and a short-lived hairdressing job involving a 57-year old boss who’d chase me around his empty shop, then pay me extra whenever I threatened to call his wife. I used my nest egg to buy three rooms of pressboard furniture from a shady concern in one of Lawrence’s vacant mills, a business that had long since vanished. So, what did I expect?

All of which is to say, our dear Sue is on the precipice. Of what, she doesn’t know. But everything inside her believes she and her young daughter are moving on. With any luck, it’ll be with Joe.