Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life

8. Charity Begins at Home

120 8 charity begins at home Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love. —ELLEN KEY (1849–1926), Swedish feminist author and critic Life in the suburbs has its rhythms and pattern. With almost no exceptions everyone gets up at the same time—and that’s bright and very, very early— gulps breakfast and joins the big parade to the station. That’s all you see of the men until the 6:10 train at night when the parade is reversed. In the long interval it’s a woman’s day. And a pretty busy one, too. Even if you’ve never been much of a joiner you’ll expand in this friendly, cooperative atmosphere . Everyone goes to local art exhibitions or garden walks. Men play golf together. There are dances, suppers, bridge games, and illustrated lectures at the community house or club. One thing can be said for life in suburbia: it’s busy every minute! —EDITH WEIGLE, “Life in the Suburbs,” Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1956 It was the late-summer buzz of the cicadas my mother longed for—the hiss of millions of the insects sequestered in the branches of mature trees in the old neighborhood. The thought of the seven-year cicadas brought to mind memories of bygone summer evenings and the struggle to fall asleep in the thick, steamy humidity of a Chicago summer, listening to Marge’s endless chatter while running chunks of ice over her face and wrists to cool down. Helen remembered with a sad fondness the summer cicadas, the sleepless nights, and the silly, nonsensical rhymes the Norwood Park boys repeated to one another inside the field house during basketball games: You think you’re cute, with a pimple on your snoot! A five-cent collar and a ten-cent suit! Beans, beans! The musical fruit! The more you eat the more you toot! charity begins at home 121 THE DINKEYS The former Helen Marie Stone of Norwood Park was now Helen Lindberg, living in a foreign world, already uneasy in spirit and depressed. Separated by 5.3 miles, the distance between Navarre Avenue and her new home on Brummel Street in Skokie, my mother could have just as easily been living in Kathmandu. For as many miles as the human eye could see in any direction, there were no shade trees to speak of on the prairie land where my dad built a marriage house for Mother in 1948. A sparse collection of newly planted twigs sprouted in the fertile loam of vanishing truck farms, surrendering to a suburban sprawl few could have imagined before World War II, when this northern district of Cook County was still called Niles Center. Helen’s homesickness had not lessened over the months since she married. Making new friends among the younger, prettier housewives married to this new class of suburban war vets was hard for her, and the good ladies of the Skokie Newcomers Club did not come by to pay the customary “Howdy, neighbor” welcome call. The stranger she called her husband was often gone from late in the morning until early the next morning. She dared not ask him where he had gone or with whom he was keeping company. He would have told her in no uncertain terms that it was none of her concern. Even visiting home posed problems. Old Stone, now delivering cans of paint from the back of his employer’s truck, had sold his Model T, and there was no regular bus service from Navarre Avenue to Skokie, among the first of Chicago’s “automobile suburbs”—Levittown West, as it were. My mother tried to master the simple operation of clutch and brake in Oscar’s Buick Roadmaster, but learning to drive was an utter impossibility for the anxious, befuddled woman. She marooned her husband’s outsize car after flooding the engine in the middle of an intersection five blocks away from Brummel Street. As a result, Helen was forced to rely on her husband’s goodwill for a ride back to Norwood Park to visit Emma and Richard. Resentment between Helen and Oscar festered slowly, growing a little each time she asked to be taken home to her mother. “This is your home, Helen,” Oscar kept reminding her. My parents’ worst fights were transportation-related until my mother figured out a circuitous route on public transportation, negotiating her way to Wieboldt’s Department Store in Evanston on a “Dinkey” train...