When Clairabelle was born, her father, Joseph Merritt More, or “Hammer” as his gang called him, was drinking Schlitz with the boys down at the Regal Bowling Alley. He was bowling a 212 average entering his third game of the evening and he didn’t think once about his gal Sassy being pregnant, or in labor at this point in time, while he was whooping it up with the guys and heavy tipping the red-lipped brunette haired waitress.

He was just back from a week roar through Missouri pitching plumbing parts for Holcomb Hardware. His talk was as slick as his pomaded hair, and he did okay for himself, for a young sales guy. And Sassy, she rode him too hard at times now, when they were just at home together, and he never thought it directly, but he always allowed himself to take breaks from her. He was young, and she was a decent dame, but she was ice sometimes. And she had gotten thick around the ankles.

“Hammer, we don’t think you can pick up that split”, Green chuckled after Joseph hurled his first ball of the frame just too obtusely. “You fellas shouldn’t talk about a girl like that. But I KNOW I can pick her up, alright!” Joseph flashed a wry smile and darted his eyes over at the young woman as he spoke, and the guys just roared and then goofily ogled the waitress when she brought them another round of brew.

It was like that for Sassy. But she just had never been good at learning the lesson too well.

Clairabelle had been first though, her first kid, popped out at Sassy’s ripening age of 25, and Sassy married Joseph Merritt More anyways, a month after Clairabelle was born in a group ceremony at city hall.

After staying nearly a week in the hospital, when Sassy got out and brought her little girl home, Joseph showed up at the house later that weekend with a big pink teddy bear and a giant bouquet of mixed geraniums.

“She don’t need no teddy bear”, Sassy spit at him when she opened the door, angry at seeing the reappearing ghost.

“This bear is for you, sweetums”, Hammer said.

“Oh, Merill”, she blushed. “You have a way.”

He kissed her lips gently but quickly and then whisked by her and asked “Where’s our kid?”

The kid was asleep in a sturdy wood rocking crib in a green wallpapered room, a fine crib she had gotten from the Assemblies church thrift store. “Don’t pick her up- it’s the first time she’s been asleep like this in-” “Oh, come here, baby girl” he chortled, and then he quickly scooped her up.

“What’dya call her?”

“Clairabelle.”

“That’s a fine name.”

He looked into her red pinched face with her closed eyes and he smiled for a few minutes, a twinkle spinning in his own eyes, and then he laid her back down.

“She’s a peach alright. Say, what do we got to drink.”

Sassy let him stay.

She didn’t know why, but she did that.

She was good at picking them up, but most of them toyed with her for a while, and then they were gone. She had decided early on that that was just how men were.

That was how the Cutter boy was in high school, tall and angular and with that charming smile.

That was how Eli, that dreamy gold spinning god of a boy- the lovedream of her life- turned out to be after a year with her during her early twenties.

Sassy had always been “a pretty girl”, with just enough verve to make guys come around, and just enough to keep ’em for a while, but they always left.

That’s what her Pa did after the war.

That’s what men did.

After Eli, there was Marcos, who didn’t really love her up close at all, but he gave her money, and he did take her out every weekend. And then there was the quiet Bramlett guy. He had been freshly raw after his wife’s sudden death and he was weepy when she met him, and she cooked and cared for him right away and he lived with her for a trim quiet spell, and there were sparks of life and then possibilities of love for a while, and then he just disappeared. One day, his clothes and his books were gone, like he had never been there.

And then there were a few others.

So when she met Joseph at the corner bar up the block, he came on to her hard and strong. Her hair was perfectly coiffed that night, and her body felt as sleek to her as it had for a while, and he had friends around him at a booth, and he came straight on over and bought her and Marci Fulmer drink after drink, and asked if Sassy had a love.

“It depends. Are you taking or giving?”

Joseph laughed because he was buzzed and Sassy looked young and pretty and he was surrounded with the fellas from work and he was the king of the bar and he wanted her right then.

“Why don’t I take you to dinner tomorrow night?”, he asked her.

“It depends- are you taking or are you giving?”

“It’s on me. And if you don’t like me afterwards, I’ll take your friend here out later instead.”

Sassy thought he was strapping and handsome and she liked his energy, but his comment angered her and she got up without a word to leave.

“Honey- HONEY”, he grabbed her arm, “I was just playing. I was just messing around.” He softened his voice. “I would like to just go to dinner with you.”

They went to dinner the following night, and the following weekend they went to the cinema for a matinee and then downtown to a club for drinks, and Sassy and the Hammer were in love by 9pm.

The “in love” part burned well for four months, as now he mostly moved in to her apartment and they were playful and passionate. They talked occasionally, but they shared looks more often that, and the heat of hunger and hope that they saw flashes of in each other.

But then the doctor visit confirmed it.

And suddenly the Hammer had to hit the road a bit more to handle his sales territory. He called her from the road, but in time he called her a little less, and then later, a little less often than that.

But somehow, they had got married and they had stayed married. Joseph and Sassy made a go of it, as the Hammer picked up a promotion at work, and started doing some regional sales and marketing stuff. But he was still gone a lot. And he still didn’t call a lot. But Sassy kind of expected it. At least he helped her take care of Clairabelle, putting food on the table. Even if sometimes the dirty dress shirts from his suitcase smelled like perfume.

And so it was for Clairabelle. She was a bright and quiet and kind child. She grew up learning to help her mom out around the flat. She did okay in school. She strugfgled to make friends. She watched her parents never touch, except after too much to drink. She knew when to stay in her room. She was always anxious around her daddy. He never really saw her, it seemed.

But that wasn’t the case when Uncle Gene came and visited them from St. Louis the summer Clairabelle turned 14. Clairabelle had suddenly started to change and her clothes fit strangely and her childhood angles rounded off and her chest grew out overnight, and when Uncle Gene saw the family in the airport and realized that Clairabelle was not a little girl anymore, he stared at her all the time. He stayed for a week with them in their apartment and where he used to talk to her about horses and dresses and dragons and kids things, on this visit he just drank and sat in the living room and stared at her and smiled when he caught her eye. Once, Sassy even barked loudly at him when the Hammer had run to the store. “Gene! She’s still a child, and she’s my baby!” He mumbled and stopped for two minutes. And Clara felt her face hot and suddenly ashamed for no reason.

Two years later, the Hammer went on a road tilt for work and didn’t come back. He had decided he really wanted the young doe Mitzi Hessen who worked at the branch parts warehouse downtown by the company’s main office as a receiving clerk. He sent Sassy a terse note in his poor writing and spelling: “We had some good times, sweetums, but time’s mooving to fast, and I found my true love. I’ll send money and the papers. Merill.” Within two weeks, she received papers. And for 6 months, he sent some money.

For a year, Sassy drank and cursed men and God and life and whores and Mitzi Heffer and the ache in her soul that was eating her away. And Clairabelle tried to take care of her- cleaning the apartment, cleaning Sassy when she was too drunk to wipe herself off or down, buying groceries and paying bills as she learned where and how to do the things that had to be done. She put a flyer up on the apartment bulletin board to announce her flat cleaning services. The Armenian bachelor down the hall who always seemed to run into her when she came home after school hired her right away. Eventually, one of his friends on the sixth floor also hired her and, like him, tended to seem to watch her while she worked. And a non-resident woman hired her to check in and to clean the apartment of her aging parents. Clairabelle was quiet and kind and cleaned well enough to keep some food in their cupboards and to cover the bills. But she was soon pretty tired herself.

And all of her mother’s rage couldn’t be ignored. Men were disgusting pigs. They just used women. All they ever did was use Sassy. Men just used her and threw her away.

“Mama, I think you need to rest. Let me take the bottle.”

The night of Clairabelle’s 18th birthday, Sassy had been sober long enough to get her old job back. And despite her hate, Sassy still longed for a man to touch her, and she had even started using the Jane Fonda workout cassette that Clairabelle had given her for her birthday earlier that spring.

Clairabelle felt good because it seemed like her mom was coming back. And Clairabelle understood her mom much more now.

A year before, the Armenian had jumped Clairabelle as she cleaned the toilet in his bathroom, and partially forced her pants down before she elbowed him in the groin and fled the apartment. Clairabelle was used to being looked at, too, and she knew that most men didn’t see her beyond her young, full body. She had told her mom about the Armenian, but they could not bear the fuss of having the police exposed to the disarray of their lives. Clairabelle quit cleaning the two men’s flats without notice, and the Armenian still met her at times, standing beyond in the dark of the apartment hall. Clairabelle realized she had a special power through her body, though, and when she could, she liked to see what it could do for her. Men had begun to give her things when she didn’t ask for them to. And she had begun to ask for things from them, just because. Not because she wanted anything from them specifically.

The night of Clairabelle’s 18th birthday, Sassy had been sober long enough to see what her daughter could do to men. And Sassy was sober enough to know she could use that for herself.

“Tonight, my little girl, we are going out for your birthday.”

“Oh, mama- are you sure? You know how things are.”

“You are only 18 once, my dear. It’s a special night.”

“Oh mama- okay. Where are we going?”

“We are going somewhere special. Now that you are a woman, we are going to share a drink together, you and I, two adults. We’ll get dinner and get some drinks. And I got you a gift.”

When Clairabelle opened the translucent white wrapping paper and then the white cardboard box from her mother, it contained a trim, form fitting chartreuse blouse with flowing, flouncy irregular trim around the waste. It was a beautiful top, and Sassy told her to try it on.

“Mama- it’s… a little tight.”

“That’s okay. We can exchange it. But go ahead and wear it tonight.”

“Mama!”

“We’ll return it this week!”

“Okay.”

They left the apartment and walked up the street to the hopping corner bar.

Clairabelle avoided masculine glances as they at dinner in their back corner booth- chophouse steaks and fries with mushrooms in the special sauce- but after the meal, Sassy took her up to the bar and with zest yelled “Today my baby is 18- who would like to buy us a drink?”

And first, the drinks came to them, delivered by the barkeep, and shortly after that, the men came as well.

It was late when Clairabelle left a handsome young carpenter at the bar, excusing herself to get some needed rest. He had aksed her if he could have her number, since they had hit it off pretty well. “Could I call you and take you out sometime?”

“It depends”, Clairabelle responded. “Are you taking or are you giving?”

Sassy had already left hours before, slipping out after a rousing cheer bellowed about the establishment for her daughter’s birthday.

Clairabelle’s walk home was short, and soon she was in the building, and up the flights of stairs to her floor, key in the lock in the dim hallway light, and then door opened to a dark entryway. She closed the door, and walked quietly down the small hallway to the door of her tiny room. She opened the door and turned on the hanging light by the wall switch and then closed the door behind her, and in the buzz of the burning bulb and the quiet of the slumbering neighborhood, she undressed, tossing her slacks and blouse on the dresser to her left. She removed her hose and then her undergarments and put them on her blouse and then turned off the light and then climbed into her bed.

As soon as she closed her eyes to think about the evening, she heard the familiar squeak of the doorknob on her mother’s door turning down the hall, and she felt a little bad immediately. She had woken her mother.

But then she heard the doorknob on her door turn, and in the dark, the door slowly whisked open, before her was the vague silhouette of a large figure filling the doorway.

And then a deep baritone voice she did not know at all spoke.

“Happy birthday, baby. Can I come in?”