What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [99]
But when her daughter Denise entered third grade, or, as Nancy would say, “When the dirty rats left me alone with no one to play with,” she became restless. She needed something to keep her occupied and made her first foray into business, as a Mary Kay Cosmetics representative. Knowing just about every family in the four hundred homes of Hegewisch and possessing good looks and a cheerfully persuasive personality, Nancy did well. She could almost always count on making $200 at each Mary Kay party.
Soon, however, the occasional night work was not enough to satisfy her. She applied for a teacher’s aide job at a local elementary school. As she was waiting to be interviewed for the job, she heard someone in the principal’s office say, “Hey, looks like we got our new school secretary.” She had no idea that the speaker was referring to her, and remained incredulous even when the principal greeted her and asked her to step outside. He informed her that he wanted to hire her as the school secretary. “No,” she protested, “I’m the school aide.”
“I’m sorry, we’ve already hired a school aide,” the principal said.
“No, there’s some mistake,” Nancy said, fearing that her chances of working in a classroom were slipping away again.
The principal ushered her back into the office and, typing the air with his fingers, asked Nancy if she could type. When she said she could not, the principal said, “That’s okay, you’ll do fine. I’ll teach you.” The next day was the first day of school. One after another, teachers paraded before her demanding supplies, book orders, and schedules, and headed off to classrooms where Nancy craved to be. After a couple of years, because of cutbacks, Nancy got bumped from her job to one as a part-time clerk in two of Chicago’s toughest elementary schools, Atgeld and Kershaw. Shootings outside the schools were frighteningly routine in those days. On more than one occasion Nancy considered herself lucky that she had been working at one school when a shooting occurred outside the other.
Perhaps it was the pressures of the time or that the trauma of Joey’s death just caught up with Jim and Nancy’s marriage, but after months of trying fruitlessly to induce Jim to talk about the state of their marriage, Nancy went to a lawyer and filed for divorce. Jim wouldn’t discuss it. He wouldn’t answer legal papers. And he wouldn’t go to court. In 1981, after twenty-one years of marriage, the couple was divorced. It is an event that both of the Gaglianos gloss over when describing their lives, and not without reason. On the day that Jim moved out of the family house, he asked Nancy for a Saturday night date to the movies. “Right there, he had me all over again,” Nancy recalled. They continued to see each other exclusively for the next seven years.
Then Jim proposed marriage for a second time. Nancy said that before they could marry again, they needed to live together. Three years after Jim moved back home, ten years after their separation, they re-wed on what would have been their thirtieth anniversary. “I know, we’re nutty,” she said.
Meanwhile, before the divorce, in the spring of 1980, life on Chicago’s Southeast Side, once a leading center for steel production in the United States, had also changed. The area suffered a major blow when Wisconsin Steel Works closed its gates and tossed out three thousand workers. Symbolically, it marked the beginning of the end of Chicago’s industrial might. Other plants followed. The South Chicago Development Corporation was established to retrain the droves of unemployed steelworkers. The then-powerful South Side political boss Ed Vrydoliak hired Nancy as the program