We stayed in Argyle, me and Tommy for awhile before Tom came for us.
I was a little confused about this. Maybe I blocked things that bothered me.
When I married Tom, I told him I needed to come back to New York to live near Mom and Dad and Sue, to take care of them. He agreed at the time. Looking back, I think he would have agreed to anything at that point and he probably didn't ever imagine he'd really be expected to do that.
I thought that after I got there from Hawaii that he came out from Ohio and looked for work but claimed he couldn't find any.
Then I started scanning old letters from and to me. Some were from Tom's mother. She couldn't understand why I didn't come back there to live with Tom. I think but I'm not sure, that if he did come at first and looked that he must have went back to the factory job in Ohio and left us in NY, however I have other memories and I just have to make sense of them.
I do remember going back there with Tom or to him at one time or other after he got out of the service. We stayed with his mother about a week and then we went to stay with the man he thought was his father.
Chuck was a real bastard. I'm sorry for using a foul word but there is nothing else tame that describes this man. Everybody ate the same thing at meals and it didn't matter if there was stuff that you didn't like. I could handle that mostly. He did at one meal cook up some kind of venison.
It was gross. It was tough and chewey. I tried it but I knew it would just about kill me if I ate it because even though I had good teeth then I still couldn't digest something if I couldn't chew it up. It was like trying to eat a hockey puck.
When no one was looking I nudge Tom and looked back at the piece of meat. Thankfully, he understood what I wanted him to do and sneaked it on to his plate and ate it. He must have had a cast iron stomach. It was truly awful.
Tom hadn't started back at the factory as far as I can recall. We didn't have much cash left. One day I needed diapers and Chuck took me to the store to get them. He paid for them in the store.
I was thinking this was good but then at the end of the two or three weeks we stayed there he handed a bill to Tom for what he said we owed him for rent, food and diapers. I was pretty much shocked by this. They weren't poor. They sure could have afforded to let us stay for free. His mom never charged us for anything.
This was the same time Tom discovered what they had done to all the boxes he had mailed from Hawaii to himself in care of his father, I think. The boxes were piled in a corner of the garage, all open and all spewing their contents out. At first Chuck told him they arrived broken. While this could have happened with one or two cartons, it wouldn't have happened with every single one of them.
Eventually, he blamed it on to the "kids" who were all old enough to know better. Some of my stuff was missing. A lot of his stuff was either broken or dirty. There was hardly a thing that did not escape some harm. We let it go because there wasn't much we thought we could do especially as we thought at the time we were living there for free.
His stuff arrived that the military had shipped from Hawaii. I have one photo of the man's underwear and the little jewelry box I liked. He had wrapped his underwear around his guns to protect them from bumping against each other when they shipped them. Everything was either wet or had been and was now rusty from being in the container with the guns.
The army's excuse was that the container had fallen off the dock in Hawaii and had gotten wet. I'm not sure what happened to the washer. I don't remember ever seeing it but it might have been there. I didn't want to ship the washer home because I was afraid of the cockroaches.
Another thing happened during our stay with Chuck and Doris his third wife. This was really icky. I don't think I ever told Mom about this. They invited us to watch a movie with them in their bedroom. They said it was a movie they didn't want the kids to see. I should have known then but I had too many other things to think about.
I am not a prude. I watched a porn movie back in Colorado Springs one night with Tom at a theater. I think it was "Debbie Does Dallas." There was a lot of graphic sex in it but it didn't make me want to hurl. This did. There were animals and people getting it on and it was turning my stomach for sure.
Tom didn't mind the movie but when I started to get up to leave saying I was tired, Chuck spoke up and said, "You know you don't have to leave. We can all share this big bed."
I almost ran out of there with Tom fast on my heels. We talked about it in our own room and he said he had no idea what the movie was about when we went in there. He seemed to be as shocked as I was at his father's suggestion. Tom was never one to share his toys and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have wanted to share his wife.
Before we left here, Tommy got sick. He had a cold of some kind. It gave him a fever. I was there while the rest were at work. I think Tom was back at work by then. I called Tom's Mom or his sister Barb.
Barb came and got us and took us to the doctors. She paid for the doctor visit and the medicine. She told me she was keeping Tommy with her while her mother went back with me to get our things from Chucks place.
They all agreed that Tommy got sick because we had left Hawaii in perfect weather to arrive in April to a cold house where the heat was never turned on. Chuck said he couldn't afford heat and we were cold the whole time we were there.
So we stayed with Janice for a bit and Tom found and rented the house on State Street in Conneaut.
This part is confusing because I thought it was some other time when I was in NY that Terry, Tom's brother and he had come out to get me and the kid and all the stuff we'd brought from Colorado and left with Mom for two years but I do know we had that grey table when we lived in State Street. Maybe as I read more or think on it it will return.
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