The Mighty Queens of Freeville

I NEVER UNDERSTOOD why writers were always thanking their agents, but now I do. Elyse Cheney helped me to find my voice. Without her help, encouragement, and representation, I would have wound up selling this book out of the trunk of my car at flea markets, along with a twelve-pack of tube socks.

Gretchen Young at Hyperion edited the book with grace, good humor, and Zen-like calm. I am so grateful. Hyperion reminds me of my hometown; it is a quirky community full of characters, and they all have my back. Ellen Archer leads by example, and I am honored to know her.

To anyone who has ever hired and paid me to do a job, I thank you—especially Jim Warren and Ann Marie Lipinski at the Chicago Tribune. I love being an advice columnist. If you hadn’t hired me, I’d also be peddling my opinion out of the trunk of my car at flea markets.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve had a home, professionally and personally, at National Public Radio. I’ve had the time of my life making radio.

Thank you to Jim Dicke, who supports the arts and artists through sustaining friendship.

For my sisters, Rachel and Anne. I look up to you both. My fear that you’ll smack me with a hairbrush has kept me off the streets.

I thank my mother, Jane, and my daughter, Emily. You are peas in a pod—indulgent, funny, and kind. You both helped me to write this book and I am so grateful.

And to Bruno Schickel. Thank you, Bruno, for my happy ending.

ONE DECEMBER DAY in the mid-1980s, I looked out the front window of my mother’s house and watched my soon-to-be husband walking up the road. He was carrying a newspaper and wearing a black chesterfield coat, leather gloves, and a fedora that had been custom blocked to fit his father’s head by a milliner at Wanamaker and Company, sometime in the 1950s. He had left the house an hour earlier hoping to buy a New York Times at the Park-it-Market in the village. I knew that the periodicals rack at our small store held only copies of our local paper, the Ithaca Journal, along with TV Guide, Guns & Ammo, and a periodical that I had never dared to open, the ominously titled Varmint Masters.

My mother came up beside me. We watched as this man, who had never purposely set foot off a sidewalk, delicately picked his way through the ice and snow on our freshly plowed driveway.

“Hmmmmmm,” she said. “He doesn’t look like he’s from around these parts.”

This was true. He was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but now he was in my neck of the woods, five hours north and a world away from Manhattan, in a place of pickup trucks and potbellied stoves and the occasional bathtub dumped on the lawn.

Later during our visit he asked my mother if there was anything that he could do for her. He was nice in that way. He knew how to behave. I’m not sure what he was really thinking at the time, but most likely his offer was one of those empty gestures that soon-to-be sons-in-law throw into the air like wedding confetti, hoping that they will briefly drift and swirl and blow quietly away.

My mother glanced around and then told him that if he wanted to, he could cut down a sapling that was growing in the front yard.

He climbed into his overcoat, pulled on his gloves, patted his hat into place, glanced in the mirror by the front door, and after a moment of reflection, took off his hat but decided to add a scarf. I ran out to the barn to retrieve the saw. I picked my way through the snow shovels, axes, rakes, hoes, and various other antique farm implements that were leftovers from our failed dairy farm, glanced at the old buckboard and carriage gathering dust in what used to be the stable, located the saw behind an old chest of drawers, and excitedly brought it to him.

Ten minutes later, he came back into the house, ruddy and triumphant, as if he had spent the afternoon splitting kindling and shoeing horses. “I love being in the country!” he exclaimed. Out in the yard, the sapling lay toppled on the ground, right where it had fallen. Next to it stood its mighty trunk—four inches in diameter and three feet high. Half of the tree was still sticking up out of the ground, like a lone fence post in search of a fence.

He said that he didn’t want to bend over.

Later, gloveless, hatless, and wearing my high school sweatshirt for protection against the bitter winter wind, I snuck out and sawed the trunk down to ground level.

In my family, the women tend to do the heavy lifting while the men—well, the men are nice and fine and they love us for a time. Then at some point, it seems that they tire of their indeterminate role in our lives, so they wage a campaign of passive resistance, and then they leave.

I come from a family of women. Nature played its part (my mother is the youngest of four daughters and I am the youngest of three), but so did the tidal outflow of men in our lives. In time, my soon-to-be husband became an ex-husband, leaving me with—yes—a daughter to raise. And it is this daughter, Emily, now eighteen, who one day looked around at her family of women and declared us to be the Mighty Queens of Freeville.

Our realm, the village of Freeville (pop. 458), isn’t much to look at. It’s located on the northern fringes of Appalachia, in the rural and worn-out landscape of upstate New York. It’s a town with one stop sign, anchored by a church, post office, elementary school, and gas station. There’s a little diner called Toads, which seems to go in and out of business roughly on the same schedule as the floods that bedevil the creek that runs behind the village. (Toads and Fall Creek both seem to jump their banks on a regular basis.)

My family has called Freeville home for over two hundred years. We’ve tilled and cultivated the land, tended chickens and Holsteins, built houses and barns and backyard sheds. Most significantly, my family has made more family, and that’s the main reason I continue to call this little place home. My mother, three aunts, two cousins, one of my sisters, three nieces, and a nephew all live in a tiny ten-house radius. My home offers one-stop shopping—family style. Though I’ve lived in New York City, London, Washington, DC, and now Chicago, for me, all roads lead back to my hometown.

My mother and two of my aunts raised their children alone. My two sisters, Rachel and Anne, were also single parents. When I got married, I deliberately tried to reverse the family’s terrible marital track record, but failed. Afterward, I did what I do best—and what I’ve been doing off and on through my adulthood.

I went home.

The women of my family taught me what family is about. They helped me to pick up the pieces when my life fell apart, and we reassembled them together into something new. They celebrated my slow recovery, witnessed my daughter’s growth and development, and championed my choices. The women in my life showed Emily and me in large and small ways that they would love us, no matter what. They abide.

Five years ago the Chicago Tribune announced that after a nationwide search they had chosen me to be “the next Ann Landers.” My hometown paper, the Ithaca Journal, ran a front-page story about it. The New York Times and Newsweek wondered who I was and how I would be able to fill Landers’s legendary shoes. Visits to the set of the Today show and CNN continued the query. Even Bill O’Reilly got into the act, bringing me onto his program in order to hector me about my family values.

In a town so intimate that people still talk about how gas station owner Bob Whyte once danced with Betty Grable at a USO show during World War II, making the front page of the Ithaca Journal is enough to catapult a person into the stratosphere of permanent local celebrity.

Now on my visits to Freeville, when I’m at the post office or at the diner, my hometown neighbors congratulate and kid me about my job. At the Freeville United Methodist Church, fellow congregants take up my column topics during Joys and Concerns, our public forum for prayer requests and blessings. When I’m doing my whites over at the Bright Day Laundromat, Joan, the owner, comments on my published opinions as she hands me my roll of quarters. During the summer, while I’m riding my bike down Main Street, cars pull over or honk and their drivers wave and yell, “Welcome home!”

But mostly when people see me, they ask the same question. They want to know how I know what I know. They want to know where my point of view comes from. I’m not a psychologist, therapist, or member of the clergy. I’ve never been the kind of person who has all the answers, though I do know where to get them. I’ve always been more likely to ask for counsel than to dole it out.

But at some point during the last five years, the balance tipped. My e-mail in-box now contains thousands of messages. My desk in Chicago is piled high with the last several days’ servings of postal mail. The envelopes, crowded and tumbling, threaten to take over. I will open each and every one of them—eventually. I’ve turned in over two thousand columns now. On the job I’ve seen five years’ worth of seasons come and go. I’ve fielded a basketful of queries from anxious brides and grooms, depressed fetishists, and long-distance lovers. I’ve communicated with kids, the elderly, baby boomers, and empty nesters.

The mail that pours in brings so many secrets, so many intimacies. In exchange for honoring me and trusting me by revealing their inner lives, my readers get my full attention, a lot of research and reporting, and a fair amount of quiet pondering. That’s one reason people write to me—they need someone to do some thinking on their behalf. They need someone to be on their side or to talk them off the ledge. They want someone to hear them and to recognize that life can be a struggle. I do. But research and reporting don’t answer the question of how I know what I know. That goes back to my family and this small town where I come from and to the fact that I—like most people actually—have had a life blessed with incident.

My family has been marked by our many losses. My brother, Charlie, has slipped from our lives, and I haven’t seen him in ten years. My father is a distant memory. He walked away from our family and a barn full of livestock in 1972, and aside from occasional sightings, he is as gone as a person could be. My sisters and I all have ex-husbands who have exited from our family’s life. We seem to be less than successful on many superficial levels. We don’t have money. We aren’t upwardly mobile. We aren’t naturally thin or beautiful. We don’t have advanced degrees, long-term career goals, or plans for retirement.

When talk about “family values” circles around and when politicians, religious leaders, and societal watchdogs trot out their examples of what a proper family is or should be, they’re never talking about us. We are the “broken” ones. We are deep into the second generation of divorce. We are single women raising children. We are working mothers with kids in day care. And yet, when I think about actual family values—not the idealized version, but the kind that families like mine demonstrate—I realize that this highly imperfect and complicated family is quite functional. If it isn’t perfect, then it is certainly good enough, and obviously very useful—certainly to me, since I make my living from drilling into the heart of other people’s problems.

So when people ask me how I know what I know or how I get to do what I do, I have the answer. I got here the hard way, by living a life and making my share of mistakes. I took the long way home, driving the back roads through marriage and divorce and raising a child on my own. But I got here with my family watching my back, with my hometown community influencing me and accepting my choices and enfolding me in their prickly embrace.

The Mighty Queens is the story of my family. Most especially, it is the story of my daughter, Emily, and me and of how we raised each other. In almost two decades of mothering her, I’ve made my share of mistakes. My daughter has watched me start and lose new careers and optimistically dab on mascara for yet another doomed blind date. She has caught me blowing fugitive cigarette smoke out the window and seen me wipe away my own tears with a paper towel while sitting, defeated, at the kitchen table. She has also witnessed the myriad and complicated joys of being in a family such as ours. And we taught each other how to have fun.

In my worst moments I fantasized about running from motherhood—but at the end of Emily’s childhood, when it came time to say good-bye to her as she left home for college, I realized that mothering her had been the making of me. I am the product of my own upbringing, living in the shadow of my father’s sudden departure during my childhood—but also witnessing my mother’s surprise late-life success. I watched my own mother prevail, and my daughter has watched me prevail too. Fortunately for us, Emily and I have grown up surrounded by the women who helped raise us.

My sisters and I get together now and then and go through our boxes of old photos—some are daguerreotypes and printed on glass or tin, some sepia-toned on crumbling paper—up through those taken with my mother’s old Kodak Brownie, which are date-stamped with tiny black lettering along the prints’ beveled edges.

There are photos of women wearing starchy Victorian blouses, bird-shaped hats, and lace-up boots; women with pinwheeling arms ice-skating on Fall Creek; women leaning against Chevy Impalas or pickup trucks, smoking cigarettes, with their arms flung around friends; women doing handstands on the lawn—or showing off their new babies, new shoes, or beloved house cats.

These are the women of my world—the Mighty Queens of Freeville—who have led small lives of great consequence in the tiny place that we call home.