Onward Toward What We're Going Toward Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One - Chic Waldbeeser & Diane von Schmidt

  Chic & Diane Waldbeeser & Lijy Waldbeeser

  Two - Mary Norwood, another beginning

  Mary Norwood & Green Geneseo

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Three - Diane & Chic & Lomax Waldbeeser or, the Waldbeeser family extended, the ...

  Green Geneseo

  Lomax Waldbeeser

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Chic & Lomax Waldbeeser

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Four - Buddy Waldbeeser

  Mary Geneseo

  Lijy Waldbeeser

  Mary Geneseo & Chic Waldbeeser, the beginning of another beginning

  Lijy Waldbeeser

  Five - Chic & Lomax & Lijy Waldbeeser

  Lijy’s Letter

  Chic Waldbeeser & Mary Geneseo

  Chic & Buddy Waldbeeser

  Chic & Diane Waldbeeser

  Six - Buddy Waldbeeser

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Buddy Waldbeeser

  Buddy Waldbeeser

  Seven - Mary & Green Geneseo

  Lijy Waldbeeser & Ellis McMillion Or, the Waldbeeser family extended, the ...

  Lijy & Buddy Waldbeeser

  Lomax Waldbeeser

  Eight - Buddy & Lijy & Russ Waldbeeser Or, the Waldbeeser family, a funeral

  Chic & Diane without Lomax, part 1

  Chic & Diane without Lomax, part 2

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Lijy & Buddy & Chic & Diane Waldbeeser

  Nine - Diane Waldbeeser

  Mary Geneseo

  Chic & Diane without Lomax, part 3

  Lijy & Baby Russ & Chic & Buddy

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Ten - Mary & Green Geneseo, continued

  Chic & Diane Waldbeeser

  Chic at Work

  Diane in Bed

  The Bathroom

  Mary Geneseo & Chic Waldbeeser

  Eleven - Buddy & Lijy Waldbeeser

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Chic & Diane Waldbeeser

  Lijy & Russ & Ellis McMillion

  Twelve - Diane Waldbeeser

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Mary Geneseo

  Diane & Chic Waldbeeser

  Thirteen - Mary Geneseo & Chic Waldbeeser

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Diane & Chic Waldbeeser

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Fourteen - Mary Geneseo & Chic Waldbeeser

  Chic & Diane & Buddy & Lijy & Russ & Baby Erika or, the Waldbeeser family, ...

  Russ Waldbeeser

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Fifteen - Diane Waldbeeser

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Chic & Diane Waldbeeser

  Diane Waldbeeser, an epilogue

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Sixteen - Chic Waldbeeser

  Mary & Green & Chic

  Seventeen - Chic & Buddy & Lijy & Russ & Ginger & Erika Waldbeeser

  Mary Geneseo & Chic Waldbeeser

  Lijy & Chic

  Chic & Buddy & Lijy & Russ & Ginger & Erika Waldbeeser

  Eighteen - Chic & Green, the beginning of the end

  Green Geneseo

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Mary & Green Geneseo

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Mary Geneseo

  Chic Waldbeeser & Mary Geneseo

  Chic Waldbeeser

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  More Advance Praise for Onward Toward what we’re Going Toward

  “Onward Toward What We’re Going Toward is impossible not to love. Ryan Bartelmay’s generosity for the characters we meet here—the lovable and the lost and the losing—elevates their lives from the mundane to the magical. With breathtaking empathy for the human condition, Bartelmay combines humor and poignancy into a singular voice that sounds like nothing but the truth.”—Nic Brown, author of Floodmarkers and Doubles

  “Ryan Bartelmay, in Onward Toward What We’re Going Toward, has written an ambitious and compelling novel of the contemporary Midwest, modernizing the American Dream by filling it with minor moments of triumph and regret.”—Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

  “Onward Toward What We’re Going Toward, reminiscent of Winesburg, Ohio, is an exquisite novel of lost and lonely people, off-center people, in small town Middle America. The palpable ache of their desperation to be loved, to connect with someone, anyone, is balanced by Mr. Bartelmay’s comic and deeply compassionate renderings. Simply put, this is a truly beautiful book.”—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route

  “Onward Toward What We’re Going Toward greets us with arms spread wide. It’s a welcome embrace from an author who knows the details of his characters’ hearts as well as he does those of the world about which he writes. Remarkable for its deft mixture of mirth and sadness, this is a moving debut that accomplishes nothing short of a glimpse of the interior—physical, emotional, psychological—of an entire country.”—Josh Weil, author of The New Valley

  To my girls, Rene and Vivian

  “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s day-to-day living that wears you out.”

  —Anton Chekhov

  One

  Chic Waldbeeser & Diane von Schmidt

  September 1950

  On the Trailways bus bound for Florida, Diane wouldn’t hold Chic’s hand, wouldn’t even look at it sitting on his knee like a dead fish. She pretended to sleep. Then she didn’t and glared straight ahead at the derby hat of the man in front of them. This wasn’t like her. For the last month, she had been chattering like a psychotic woodpecker about their honeymoon—they were going to do this, they were going to do that, this and that, and this and that, and this—and here they were, and she was grinding her teeth loud enough he could hear it.

  At a bathroom break in Kentucky, he asked her if she wanted a NuGrape or some Nibs. She huffed and stared out the bus window. Inside the filling station, he bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine and stood at the filling station’s screen door watching a few navy guys taunt a yip-yip dog with a stick. His mind flashed to Lijy, his brother’s wife. He wondered what she was doing right now. What was that back rub about at the reception?

  The old man behind the pay counter said, “That Truman shouldn’t even be in Washington. My vote would have been for Wallace. That is, if I could get someone to watch the store so I could vote.”

  Chic took a pull off his soda.

  “Couldn’t though. My son doesn’t wanna have anything to do with it. And my wife, she spends all day at the sewing machine.”

  “They’re gonna hurt that dog,” Chic said.

  “Nah. That dog’s fine. Seen it get hit by a truck, get back up and keep barking. We’re all like that dog. We all just keep barking.”

  Chic dug a dime from his pocket. He was gonna get himself some Korn Kurls.

  “Hey, where’s that bus headed?”

  “Florida. Then, I don’t know. Back I guess.”

  “You know if I was going to Florida, I’d go to Gatorland. I hear they got albino alligators.”

  “I don’t think my wife would like that.”

  “You got a wife?”

  “Yes sir.” Chic set his dime on the counter.

  “I’d find me a way to get to Gatorland. Don’t be letting your wife not let you see an albino alligator.”

  “You seen it?”

  “Heard about it.”

  Back on the road, Chic stuffed Korn Kurls in his mouth. He was thinking about that albino all
igator. He’d never seen anything albino. There was a kid in his grade school class, a kid whose name he couldn’t remember, who had real blond hair and everyone said he was an albino, but he wasn’t. Albinos had pink eyes and that kid had blue eyes. Then that kid moved away. Whatever happened to him? He probably went to high school somewhere, probably got married, probably got a job.

  “Can’t believe you sometimes, Chic Waldbeeser.”

  He looked at his new wife, her anger so obvious he could hear it whirling like a drill.

  “You haven’t said anything to me in . . . ” He looked at his watch. “. . . twelve hours. Now you tell me you can’t believe me. What’s wrong with you?”

  She cocked herself away from him and stared out the window. The bus passed a billboard that read, “Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own.”

  He knew he had to do some fancy footwork. He dangled a Korn Kurl in front of her. “Want one? They’re good.”

  She rested her head on the window and pretended to be asleep.

  Chic ate the Kurl. He tried nudging her with his elbow a couple of times. He tried poking her arm with his index finger. After about a minute, she opened her eyes and said: “Will you please stop that.”

  “Why are you mad?”

  “You should know.” She closed her eyes.

  He poked her arm—once, twice, three times, four times.

  “If you don’t stop that, I’m going to scream.”

  He finished his Korn Kurls and checked out the other passengers in the bus. The navy guys were sitting in the back talking in low whispers. A peanut sailed from the back of the bus and clinked off the woman in the seat opposite Chic. Chic turned around and saw the navy guys giggling. One held a hand over his mouth. The woman wiped her arm. She’d gotten on the bus at Carbondale, Illinois and Chic had heard her tell the driver she was going to visit her “Nana” in Pensacola. He looked over at Diane to see if she was awake. Her eyes were closed.

  Chic never had a girlfriend in high school. Every time he approached a girl he froze up and his tongue felt like a sponge. He was not an unattractive boy with his flattop haircut, cuffed Levi’s, and starched white t-shirt, but the confused look on his face made him appear like he was a few steps behind the herd. His shoes were always untied. After walking into a room he wasn’t quite sure where to go, so he just stood there, causing a bottleneck in the doorway. Teachers and other adults liked him, though. He smiled a lot, kept his fingernails trimmed, said “please” and “thank you” and called women “ma’am.” In November, at a Middleville football game, while he sat in the bleachers, Diane approached him and told him that he, Chic Waldbeeser, was going to take her to the Dairy Queen after the game. He was sitting with a bunch of guys who weren’t even really worth mentioning, guys just about like him, guys who all stopped talking and craned their necks to look up at Diane. Everyone knew Diane von Schmidt. Her father was a math teacher, but she didn’t act like a math teacher’s daughter. She wore high-heeled shoes to the school dances. She’d gone steady with Randy Rugaard for two years, and in gym class, he bragged that she was a real “Sheba.” And by that he meant she was a tomcat. And by that he meant that she pretty much wore him out.

  After ice cream, sitting in the front seat of Chic’s mother’s Plymouth four-door sedan, Diane stuck her mouth on Chic’s and gave him a big lip-to-lip smooch-a-roo. She pulled away and giggled, wiped her mouth. Then she asked, “What do you want more than anything in the whole wide world?” Her voice was full of the type of confidence that made Chic shaky.

  “A big dog,” Chic said.

  “No. I mean in life.”

  He thought about this. A big dog would make things a little better. Big dogs made happy families, and for the past ten years, his family life had been in shambles. When he was eight, his father went outside behind the barn and sat down in the snow and, no kidding here, froze himself to death. Diane knew about this. Everyone did. And they all looked at Chic a little bit out of the corner of their eyes as a result. He pretty much didn’t let himself think about it all that much. He just thought about having his own family someday, and that big dog. That seemed to be the way to handle things like this—keep marching forward and don’t look over your shoulder. That’s what his mother had done. The day after his father’s funeral she was riding around in Tom McNeeley’s Dodge Fore-Point pickup. What did he—Chic Waldbeeser—want more than anything? That was easy if he let himself think about it, but he pushed it to the back of his mind, way back where the spiderwebs grew and there was the constant sound of a dripping faucet. But since she asked, since she was Diane von Schmidt, daughter of a math teacher, a real Sheba, he was going to tell her. “I want a normal family,” he whispered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A normal family. A normal life.”

  About a year later, Diane’s father shelled out for a big wedding. Blessed Sacrament, the Catholic church in Middleville, Ilinois was stuffed full of Diane’s aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, and third cousins. Chic’s mother sent a fruit basket and card that said she couldn’t make it. She was down in Florida learning how to play tennis. She had moved down there with Tom McNeeley the day after Chic graduated from high school. The lone invitee on the Waldbeeser side was Mr. Kenneth Waxman, a friend of Chic’s father; Mr. Waxman was squeezed off on the far side of the church next to Diane’s third cousin Mary Lou from Junction City, Kansas, and her seven children.

  An elderly uncle on the von Schmidt side, a longtime resident of Middleville, leaned over to his wife and said, “Now, what exactly did the Waldbeeser father do?”

  His wife said, “Committed suicide, maybe ten years ago.”

  “Yeah, yeah . . . I know that. What did he do, do, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “Worked at the cannery probably.”

  Chic’s brother, Buddy, stood at the altar next to Chic with the ring in his pocket. He’d recently returned from out East or West, or someplace, whereever it was. He wasn’t too forthcoming. When he returned, just in time for Chic’s high school graduation, he had a wife, an Indian woman, who, because she was Indian and dressed in a sari and wore flip-flop shoes that showed her toes, caused the townsfolk to whisper. Buddy was a long boy, tall and lean like a two-by-four. In a crowded room, his was the only face you’d see, but that’s where the metaphor for head and shoulders above the crowd stopped. He had gotten mostly Cs in high school. He was shy. At the reception, he got lit up on the spiked punch and, during his best man speech, slurred his words and blabbered on about his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father from Germany, Bascom Waldbeeser, who had founded Middleville with his wife Kiki, and their son, Bascom Jr., after the couple came north from New Orleans.

  The people seated on folding chairs looked at each other. Every Middlevillian knew R. S. Archerbach and his sons had founded Middleville and started the cannery in 1880-something. There was a book, Middleville, Illinois: Our Town, Our Lives, Our Story, put together by Mrs. Ruth Van Eatton, an English teacher at the high school. The book had black and white photographs of the Archerbach family and other first Middleville families and the pumpkin cannery (which is now a National Historic Landmark) on Main Street circa 1884 and the railroad stop on Jefferson and First Street that connected Middleville with Peoria, twenty miles to the north. Diane leaned over and asked Chic why his brother was claiming the Waldbeeser family was responsible for the cannery. Chic shrugged, pretending not to know what his brother was up to, but he knew. This was what their grandfather had told them when they were young, a fairy tale meant to give Buddy and Chic incentive to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and to go forth into the world and chase down their destinies. Or, at least, that’s how Chic interpreted the story.

  After fifteen minutes, a ten-year-old second cousin switched off the lights, and the entire reception hall went black. Aunts and other women gasped. Someone whispered, “Thank god.”

  When the lights came back on, Buddy was in the middle of the dance floor, wave
ring a little bit, drunk. He held up his glass. “Congrajewl . . . ” He burped. “Congrajewlations.”

  Diane’s father guided him out a side door to the parking lot, and someone started the jukebox, Patti Page singing “All My Love.”

  With the reception getting back to normal and people grabbing the hands of their loved ones and dragging them to the dance floor, Chic found himself standing behind Lijy, Buddy’s wife. She was picking lint off the front of her sari. The whole reception, Chic had noticed Diane’s aunts and uncles nudging each other and whispering about her. Other than pictures in books, she was the first Indian anyone in Middleville had ever seen. On Main Street, when she went into Witzig’s, the department store across from the Dairy Queen, Buick Roadmasters literally screeched to a stop and eight-year old kids in backseats rolled down their windows and pointed. Standing there on the fringe of the dance floor, Chic pressed in, getting close enough that he could smell her hair. It smelled odd but good—earthy and spicy, musky maybe. She reminded Chic of a doll.

  She turned around and cleared her throat.

  Chic immediately noticed the bulge of her breasts under the sari. He hadn’t noticed them before, but there they were—about the size of grapefruits. “I was . . . ” He quickly looked at his wingtips and tightly closed his eyes. She’d seen him; she’d seen him staring at her breasts. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  She wasn’t even paying attention to him. She was looking through him, beyond him, to where Buddy had disappeared through the side door to the parking lot. Chic glanced over his shoulder, and there was Buddy, coming back into the reception, Diane’s father behind him. Buddy was wiping his mouth with a hanky and his tie was loosened. He was pale, like he’d just vomited.