Battleaxe

Battleaxe Molly Lonergan was the bane of my nine year old existence. Carved out of a chilling block of ice, she could have played hockey and never gotten hurt. Phil Esposito in a housecoat with wavy silver hair. She was a cement roadblock not even a Massachusetts statie could get through! Rarely was she without the cat eyeglasses that hid a small measure of vulnerability in her face. They made her look meaner than Sister Maria Roberts ~ no small feat. She was second generation Irish. A balky, unbending, battleaxe. “Mrs. L” my mother called her. Like she was lady of the manor or something - dignified and graceful. My mother was kind to her. Something I didn’t get at all. Molly was mean and ugly like the wicked stepmother in Cinderella. Always nagging and creating needless work, like polishing the silver. Who even had silver?? She’d take my sister and I with her to sit and wait while the Donovan’s did her hair. They had a beauty shop over on Essex street in Lawrence. It looked more like an old dentist’s office. The kind that’s at the top of seven flights of stairs and down the end of a very long hallway… All the tops of the doors have that dirty dishwater colored glass that you can’t see through with big black letters written on them like Geoffrey Bromberg, Psychiatric Medicine. Christ. You know he has a strap down table in there. Just like “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. Molly huffed and puffed her way past all of them into the girls’ shop while my sister and I, breathing in the ammonia fumes, made separate deals with God that we’d never get old.

© m. lonergan 2008