Runaway

Chapter IV

A week, Rosie had been at the hospital as a nurse and she was utterly exhausted. Every morning, before she went to work, she stopped by the Chevy Diner and ordered a cup of coffee from Dorothy, who was happy to oblige. Rosie really enjoyed Dorothy's company and offered for Dorothy to visit her sometime, but Dorothy always declined. "If I'm not working here, I'm at home taking care of my brothers," she always said.

Heidi and Louise worked at the hospital with Rosie and Heidi was always talking, no matter what they were doing; Louise, not so much. Heidi liked to talk about the weather and the patients and how handsome Elvis was (she always lowered her voice when discussing his hips)... You name it, she probably wanted to discuss it. She was a fan of 'I Love Lucy' marathons and 'The Donna Reed Show', always talking about how wonderful the dresses on the shows were and how fashionable Lucy Ricardo and Donna Reed were. Louise, on the other hand, thought the Soviets couldn't possibly be as advanced as America and that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was just fine as president, thank you very much. She liked the older classics like Ava Gardner, Vivien Leigh and Una Merkel and had a lot of old movie posters she would passionately discuss, if one brought them up. Louise's idol was Ingrid Bergman while Heidi's was Marilyn Monroe; Louise loved rock n' roll while Heidi liked doo wop and bubblegum pop; Louise liked the rockabilly pants and headscarves while Heidi raved about the feminine feel of the 1950's petticoats and hairstyles. In essence, Heidi was a brightly lit doorway while Louise was the shadow; the two seemed almost too different to live under the same roof and yet, they were inseparable. They reminded Rosie much of her own friendship with Barbara Ann.

Barbara Ann and Rosie both grew up around a small industrial town in North Jersey called Belleville. Belleville had its own beauty, once one looked past the smog. The hills were large and the roads a danger to drivers, but a blessing to sledders during the winter. It was located in Essex County, well north of where Rosie and Barbara Ann lived in 1957; it was circled by the towns of Glen Ridge to the west, East Orange to the southwest, Newark to the south, Harrison and Kearny to the southeast, North Arlington to the east, Lyndhurst to the northeast and Nutley to the north. These North Jersey towns all looked identical; very close two-story houses with basements, large blocky front steps, small porches, small backyards and a very narrow alley between the houses that led to the next street over. The neighborhood streets weren't incredibly busy, but they were adequately full during rush hour. Power lines ran along both sides of the streets and occasionally crossed; street lamps lined the streets where teenage boys would often stand under and sing someone else's latest hit at night; on the top of the hill that Barbara Ann's family had lived on, one could look at the horizon and see factories puffing smoke into the sky and beyond that, Newark, the Hudson River and New York City. Rosie was homeschooled for elementary school, but when her mother tired of her, she sent her to the middle school, where she met Barbara Ann, and attended Belleville High School (Rosie had once had a crush on Tommy DeVito of the Four Seasons in the seventh grade). Rosie went straight to nursing school after graduating in 1952 and Barbara Ann went out of state until her accident.

Rosie had a brother, George Clark, who was eight years her senior, and hadn't seen much of him since she was nine. If she did see him, it was briefly, and they weren't close to any degree. Her father, Andrew Clark,  had worked in a factory for most of his life and had been forty when Rosie was born in 1934. He had been a factory working starting at the age of thirteen - around 1907 - and had developed horrible lung complications from the nasty conditions of the textile mill. Andrew Clark lived his entire life in Belleville and died in 1945 due to the lung complications that had plagued him; Rosie had been eleven years old.

Rosie's mother, Elaine Clark, had a very poor relationship with Rosie. Elaine Clark had been born Elaine Fealy - the unknown cousin to Edwardian actress Maude Fealy - in 1893 in Tennessee, but had been moved to Belleville in 1909 - her mother had passed in 1899 due to complications in childbirth. Edward Fealy fathered four beautiful daughters, but none of them compared to his third daughter, Elaine; Elaine had beautiful golden blonde hair and brilliant sky blue eyes. She was poised, elegant and a very accomplished painter and pianist. Her sisters, Elizabeth, Esther and Evelyn, possessed nothing that could compare to their sister, Elaine, so they envied her as their father favorited her. Elaine had been walking home from school on the arm of a promising young suitor called Terence Bigelow in 1911 when she had first met Andrew Clark; he had been leaving the factory with orders to deliver a specially-ordered cloth to a wealthy patron - a job he almost hadn't been given - when he bumped into Elaine Fealy and Terence Bigelow. Terence had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and threatened to harm him, but Elaine stopped him. Elaine married Terence Bigelow in late 1914, happy to be spoiled with his wealth and wear the fanciest of clothes wherever she went, and was widowed three years later early in 1918, when Terence Bigelow had become a casualty of the Great War deep inside of a trench where a shell had landed. Devastated and childless - and unable to claim Terence Bigelow's fortune - she was unsure of what to do with herself. Her father was ill and dying of the consumption and her sisters were married and happy to see that she had fallen from her pedestal. The only person she had left was Andrew Clark, who managed to place himself in the locations Elaine was when alone. She allowed him to court her in silence for three years until she finally agreed to marry him in 1921.