Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Read online

  “You’re not driving into the city tonight,” Mr. Jaffe told his son. “I’ll take you in the morning when I go to the office.”

  “I’ve got my interview in the morning. I need to go tonight.”

  “You’re not going this late, Marc.”

  They went back and forth for a while until the younger Jaffe said: “Well what about her?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl I met in the Detroit airport. I promised her a ride,” he said, motioning to the pitiful figure a few feet away feigning great interest in the vending machine.

  “I don’t care about the girl you met on the plane. You aren’t driving there tonight.”

  They argued a bit more in hushed tones as I stepped farther away, mortified, looking around to see if there was a hotel connected to Islip Regional Airport or perhaps just a broom closet where I could curl up for the night with a bottle of floor cleaner and my embarrassment. Marc finally came over to tell me we weren’t going to the city until morning, but I could spend the night at his parents’ house. Twenty minutes later, I was crawling into a double bed with his younger sister.

  “Sarah, this is a friend of Marc’s,” his mom told her daughter, who was half asleep. “Her name is, um . . . ”

  “Katherine Snow,” I offered.

  “Scream if you need anything, Sarah.”

  The next morning, Marc’s mother offered me a glass of orange juice as we stood in the kitchen and watched breaking news. Saddam Hussein had surrendered, and the Gulf War was ending.

  Mr. Jaffe drove Marc and me into the city. The forty-five-minute car ride was mostly silent. Adam met me at the law firm where Marc was interviewing.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to go to Islip?” he asked.

  That afternoon I met his parents at the Letterman show minutes before it started. I’d been dreading it all day because, well, I’d spent the night with a guy I met in the airport on the way to meet them and their son.

  “Oh, Katherine, I’m so glad you made it,” his mom said, giving me a hug.

  “And I’m not sure you’re better off with Adam instead of the law student,” his father teased.

  Letterman, being prodded by Hal Gurnee, spoke to me during his brief monologue to warm up the audience.

  “Miss, are those suede pants you’re wearing?” he asked. I nodded yes. “I’ve always wondered, don’t they chafe you?”

  His guests were Dana Carvey and Ashley Montana, who had just been on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. But at dinner afterward, it was Late Night with Katherine Snow. Adam and his parents and even Hal got a good laugh as I told my humiliating story of being stranded at the Jaffes and confessed I had never even met the cousin who my host knew.

  “Katherine, you are so resourceful and brave,” his mom said. “Anybody else would have been stuck in Detroit for the weekend.”

  “I’m not surprised this smart lawyer seized on the chance to save you from a weekend in Detroit,” his dad added. Adam beamed. And just like that, my route from Spartanburg to Memphis to Detroit to the Jaffe household led me right out of transitional territory and into official girlfriend status.

  7. Never Arrive at the Funeral Home Late

  I watched from the second-to-last basement stair, which was covered in the original short-pile marigold carpet from 1959. My mother ironed my sister Melinda’s tea-length dress. It was the color of orange sherbet, lace overlaying silk. Melinda had worn it to our cousin Melanie’s wedding several years earlier. It would be the last dress she would ever wear, because she was to be buried in it the next day.

  We had to be at Brown-Wynne Funeral Home to plan my sister’s funeral in just about an hour. My mother, who painstakingly pressed every tuck and every pleat, was moving in slow motion. Then she stopped ironing to talk, a habit that always drove me crazy.

  “First thing this morning, we heard a lawnmower and looked out the dining room window and that sweet Grady Cooper was mowing the lawn. He did the front and back in all this heat,” she told me, referring to my dad’s good friend since sixth grade. Grady knew we’d have people coming over and wanted the house to look good, but more so, he just wanted to do something to help when there really was nothing anyone could do.

  “And then that wonderful Glenn Keever insisted on going with your father and Alean to the funeral home this morning,” she said as she placed a tulip sleeve over the tip of the ironing board.

  Alean was the housekeeper who had stayed with Melinda and me when we were little and my mother taught at N.C. State University. She was still coming once a week when Melinda died at age thirty-one in a car crash. After my father told her the funeral would be closed casket, Alean asked if she could see Melinda once more. He complied immediately, later telling me he wouldn’t have done that for anyone but her.

  Glenn was one of my father’s closest friends. He had identified my sister’s body for the authorities after she was killed by a drunk driver. My parents were out of town, and I was living in Florida. This all happened more than twenty years ago, and as every well-wisher promised me at the time, the pain has lessened. The gaping hole will never be refilled.

  I still remember how the basement smelled that day with the stiff, clean fragrance of Niagara Spray Starch as my mom ironed. It was a familiar scent because the ironing board was always in our basement, where Melinda and I had spent hours, thousands of hours, playing. She was three years older, so she always directed whatever we were doing, but her unleashed imagination rarely gave me reason to complain.

  My mother seemed to have lost five pounds in the three days since we had convened at our brick house in Raleigh following Melinda’s death. Her yellow linen dress was a burlap sack on her as she stood at the ironing board. I had never seen her exercise beyond an evening walk, but ironing was an Olympic sport with lots of pounding and intricate turns on flowing fabric. Her hand was always quicker than the eye as she got anything ready to walk out the door within minutes looking much better than the day it was bought. Today, however, she was taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r. We were going to be late if she didn’t pick up the pace.

  To my right was the big brick fireplace, devoid of ashes in June. I pictured it two decades before, lined with produce boxes my mom procured from Winn-Dixie so Melinda and I could stack them three high and eight long to build empires for our Barbies. We created more than we’d played. The perfectly proportioned plastic dolls slept on lush beds made from Kleenex boxes and potholders. Lamps were Crest lids stuck on aggie marbles with Silly Putty. For chairs, we cut off the tops of Dixie cups, stuffed them with cotton balls, and covered them with scraps from the sewing cabinet.

  Our next-door neighbor Marie Smith complained repeatedly to my mother that when she washed her dishes, she looked out her kitchen window down the hill into our messy basement full of boxes. Melinda and Katherine should clean up their toys at the end of each day like her daughter Betty had always done.

  My mother put up curtains.

  We had the requisite plastic Barbie furniture, too, and wooden ladder-back chairs Santa put in our stocking every year. Once we were old enough to know, Melinda teased my parents as she peeled the “Made by the Blind” stickers off the chairs and asked if Santa’s elves were visually impaired.

  Finally, my mother was done ironing Melinda’s dress. She carefully hung it on a padded coat hanger. Now if she could just change clothes quickly we could leave in ten minutes and get to the funeral home almost on time. But then she placed a pair of white cotton underwear over the ironing board and gingerly touched the steaming iron to the fabric, an inch at a time.

  Nobody, I mean nobody, was even going to see the underwear. What was she doing? And then I got it. I was only four months pregnant with my first child, but I got it. She wanted to be Melinda’s mother for five more minutes. She wanted to keep ironing, caring, teaching, defending, celebrating, helping, consoling, praising. This was the last thing she would ever do for her daughter.

  “I love you so, so much and
so did Melinda,” I said as I rushed to my mother and hugged her.

  “Thank you, Katherine. I love you more than you will ever know,” she said through tears.

  We were a good half hour late to the funeral home. Nobody complained.

  8. Don’t Bring Your Problems to Work

  Every pregnant woman in the ’90s received three copies of What to Expect When You’re Expecting at her baby shower, even though she had already rushed out to by her own copy the day after she had unprotected sex for the first time. We had no Internet on which to look up questions and symptoms, so the book became an appendage the moment that second line on the plastic pregnancy test turned pink. Since we also had no Dr. Oz to warn us that constant self-diagnosis is a bad thing, we grew to hate the sketch of the serene mother-to-be confidently patting her belly on the book’s cover, because she made us feel our constant worry meant we were already failing at motherhood.

  Six weeks into my first pregnancy, my total lack of morning sickness convinced me my baby was completely cut off from my food supply. By eight weeks, I’d gained twice the weight I should have. At nine weeks, I was so behind on my Kegel exercises that a Caesarean section loomed as certain. At ten weeks, when my forehead felt clammy as I headed out the door to work, I knew it was critical that I discern if I had a fever, because I’d read something in What to Expect stating fevers can cause problems with the baby.

  I was running late and faced a forty-five-minute commute from Tampa to the St. Petersburg Times bureau in New Port Richey, so I grabbed the glass thermometer out of the bathroom drawer filled with Q-tips and bobby pins, then stuck it in my mouth as I pulled out of the driveway. I planned to drive straight to the doctor’s office if I had a fever, but before I reached the first stoplight, I found out I was a cool 98.6. I checked twice more to make sure, because you can’t be too careful when you’re maintaining a normal body temperature for two. Finally, I was satisfied my baby was safe, but, of course, I still failed as a mother because I didn’t do a single Kegel exercise at a single stoplight as What to Expect suggested.

  As I neared my office, I moved the glass thermometer from the passenger seat and dropped it into the lower compartment on the driver’s side door. It sat there three days before I noticed that the heat had burst the glass and silver drops of mercury were oozing out.

  “I’ve got mercury secreting in my car because I broke a thermometer,” I said as I walked into the ten-person newsroom. “Is that bad or anything?”

  “Only if you’re pregnant,” quipped my editor, Mike Moscardini. “It can cause birth defects.”

  I didn’t make it the twenty feet past his desk to my own before wailing: “I am pregnant. Oh my God. What did I do?”

  Fingers throughout the newsroom poised on A-S-D-F-J-K-L-; froze in place. Snarky banter went silent. A motley crew of work colleagues transformed into my greatest allies.

  “How far along are you?” Moscardini asked.

  “Ten weeks,” I answered.

  He fired off orders.

  “Jamal, call whoever handles hazardous materials in Pasco County. Thomas, find the leading expert on the effects of mercury on unborn babies. Roger, get everything the CDC has on mercury and pregnant women.”

  I don’t know what ran in the daily Pasco Times section the next day because everyone in our small but mighty troop was researching mercury or trying to comfort me. Normally, we were used to cranking out stories on crime, business, arts, education, and the typical bizarre Florida happenings that plagued Pasco County.

  There was the owner of the German restaurant who kicked out a policeman for putting ketchup instead of applesauce on his potato pancakes; the all-you-can-eat-buffet restaurant patrons who saw nothing wrong with lining their pocketbooks with aluminum foil and taking food home for the rest of the week; the dinner theater director who caught flack for giving all the leading parts to his girlfriend, Candy Cane; and the neighborhood association president with the electric bullhorn warning “BUYERS BEWARE” as he walked behind a fast-talking vacuum cleaner salesman going door to door in a retirement community.

  “If a vacuum cleaner costs $1,400, I want to be able to ride it to work,” Moscardini said when I told him about the ruckus at Sunset Shores.

  Ask anyone who ever worked for Mike Moscardini, including the reporters and editors who went on to win Pulitzers, cover the White House, or become editors at top papers and websites, to name the most influential journalist in their career and most of them will say: “Moscardini.” We never called him Mike.

  On the surface, he was an asshole. Underneath he wasn’t. He had a great sense of humor and sincere interest in every story and every journalist. When a reporter heard a small-time circus was coming to Pasco and raising a big top in the dejected county for the first time in decades, Moscardini immediately instructed him to find a way to be fired out of the cannon on opening day and write a first-person story on it. “Even if it’s your last,” he added.

  Moscardini gave no misleading pretenses that he’d be an easy boss starting from the job interview. I unknowingly went through the same rite of passage others before me were subjected to after going on about my passion for local news and exposing corruption. He nodded and even seemed moderately impressed with my clips.

  “Well, this all sounds pretty good,” he said. “But let me ask you, what do you make of Fawn Liebowitz?”

  The name was familiar, but I had no idea who she was or what she had to do with Florida news or journalism.

  “Um, I’m spacing. I’m not sure who you are talking about.”

  “You’re not sure or you have no earthly idea?”

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  “Well, have you ever heard of a little movie called Animal House?” he said in disgust and walked out of his office, leaving me sitting alone.

  Still I wasn’t totally shocked as I watched the hard-ass editor become my fiercest protector when crisis hit one of our own. Within less than an hour of the mercury discovery, the Pasco County Hazardous Materials division was well aware of the situation at the St. Petersburg Times bureau when I called to find out if it was okay to drive my car home at the end of the day.

  “Oh, you’re the pregnant lady at the Times. The one with the spill,” the secretary said. “I’m going to put you right through to our director.”

  He advised me to go nowhere near said vehicle, not even to get the garage door opener or my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and gave me a list of companies that handle hazmat cleanups. After sharing my story with the one nearest our office, the owner declined to take the job.

  “Look, you being pregnant and all, I just can’t be responsible for making sure the car is completely safe. If your baby comes out with two heads or something, you could sue the hell out of me,” he said matter-of-factly as I burst into tears yet again.

  After that, Mike assigned Roger to go down the list and soon he found a company in Lakeland, two counties to the east, that would tow my car to their shop and decontaminate it for $1,500. I had not thought to put a hazmat cleanup rider on my car insurance policy, so it was all out of pocket.

  Two hours later a three-man crew showed up in yellow suits and clear helmets that I think they bought from the set of Dustin Hoffman’s Outbreak, which had come out a year earlier. The advertising staff joined the news team in our executive editor Bill Stevens’ office as we watched Pasco’s hazmat trio rope off the parking lot with yellow hazard tape lined with skulls and crossbones. Then, in a death-defying instant, the bravest of the three opened the driver’s side door, turned the ignition, put the car in neutral, and slammed the door shut. My red Volvo, the car we bought because it was the safest on the road until I turned it into a deathtrap, was hooked up to a waiting tow truck and transported seventy-five miles to Lakeland.

  Moscardini broke the silence.

  “That’s it? That’s all those clowns had to do?” he fumed. “Hell, I’d have let you pay Leo fifty bucks, and he could have held his breath and done
that.” Leo was Moscardini’s twelve-year-old son.

  By the end of the day, my colleagues learned of several case studies involving pregnant women and mercury. One of the four, a dental hygienist exposed to high levels of the element, gave birth to a baby with developmental delays. We learned that breathing mercury in its gaseous state, like I had, is much more dangerous than holding or even swallowing it in a liquid state. Like a true newsman and protector, Moscardini encouraged me to be tested so we could have all the facts. After a week of collecting my urine, keeping it in a cooler next to my desk, and hearing countless jokes about the smell of piss in the air, my ample sample was sent off to a lab. Five days later, we all learned I had as much mercury in my system as someone who had eaten swordfish several times in one week.

  I say “we” found out, because it wasn’t just me, it was the whole newsroom, who worried for me and with me.

  About seven months later when Olivia was born, within minutes of scoring a ten on the Apgar, Roger called the hospital from the office for an update.

  “It’s a girl. They named her Olivia Snow Smith. She’s completely healthy. And Katherine’s fine, too,” I heard him announce to the newsroom, with applause followed by laughter.

  “Moscardini has one question,” he relayed. “Can you still get your weekend story in by Friday at noon?”

  9. Send Your Kids to the Best School in Town

  My oldest daughter was ready to start school from about the time she was two. She watched Arthur, the animated aardvark on PBS, win Mr. Ratburn’s spelling bee and wanted to do the same. She loved the book, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, and acted out taking her own purple plastic purse off to school, where there were pointy pencils and rows and rows of books. She watched neighboring kids go to school each day only to return looking the same, but Olivia seemed to fear they were gaining on her.