Kitchen Wary - Nez

Disney’s original Mickey Mouse Club had it’s star, Annette Funicello. Lyman had no Mickey Mouse Club but it did have Margie Carpenter, Annette’s doppelganger. Margie was very pretty and looked like Annette. And there was one big difference. Margie did not plan on being a celebrity and didn’t want to be one. She was very quiet and reserved, the wallflower type and preferred it that way. She didn’t like the camera, though it liked her. She avoided the spotlight. She just wanted to be a normal teenage girl with a few friends, nothing special. Yet, her teenage good looks always brought her an inordinate amount of attention, Annette-like attention. She was an unintentional celebrity pretty much everywhere she went. A local newspaper even sent photos of her to Walt Disney but Disney said they received hundreds of pictures claiming they looked like Annette. Lyman’s Annette couldn’t wait to get out of high school and move on with her quiet normal life as Margie.

Margie, along with Sharron (the group alpha) and Kay were a threesome of best friends who became lifelong friends. After high school they each married a local boy, had the normal families with two or three kids, and became housewives, though Sharron and Kay also had real jobs, and Kay moved away from Lyman. None of them went to college, that wasn’t in the plan. Because in 1959 most girls got married soon after high school and raised a family, and this threesome followed that plan. And even though Kay had moved away they got back together in Lyman at least two or three times every year …at first. Kids in school made it harder. So, they phoned regularly. And of course, life happened.

In his late thirties Margie’s husband was killed in a logging accident in the mountains and Margie was soon an affluent Lyman widow with a sizable lifetime income thanks to the Scott Paper Company. Even after her three grown children left her an empty-nester Margie did not seek out either a career or a new husband. She was a widow the rest of her days.

Margie’s son, Gordon, had considerable behavioral problems throughout his life and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and manic depression. With therapies and medication, he managed to get through high school and then promptly left home. He ghosted his mother but brazenly showed up every few years demanding money. He spent no time with her and as soon as she gave him money he hit the road. No good-by, no thank you, just gone. Fortunately, Margie also had two married daughters and a few grandchildren so she chose to give her love and time to them, rather than wasting her time and money searching for or rescuing her screwed up son.

As the years passed life repeated itself with Gordon though, and one day Margie got a call from an attorney who was representing him in a legal proceeding. She paid for his defense but he was convicted of assault and spent the next few years incarcerated. By her sixtieth birthday Margie had finally quit paying for the reprobate’s legal defenses and had removed him from her will. She also stopped giving him money and visiting him in jail. By the time Margie celebrated her seventieth birthday her felon son had spent more than half his life in jail. And then, during the party for her seventy-fifth birthday she got a call from him saying that he was being paroled and needed a place to live. He had no idea it was her birthday. She reluctantly decided to put him in her rent-house in Bellingham, and she would pay the utilities. He approved and moved to Bellingham. Not a single ‘thank you’.

A few months later Margie got another call from  him saying that the Bellingham house had burned down while he was out, and he was tired and felt he was getting old and asked if he could just come live with her. Knowing that he was now in his mid-fifties, she thought ‘how bad could it be’? So, she said she needed time to think about it and to call her tomorrow. Her friends and daughters said, ‘definitely not’. The next day he showed up, to move into his old room. She acquiesced and allowed him to do so with the stipulation that he get a job and pay rent. He agreed and went upstairs to his old bedroom. She had neighbors next door and friends who came by every day so she allowed that it was probably safe.

Margie went about her daily routines of tending her garden, taking walks and riding her bicycle around town visiting friends and doing her shopping. She didn’t mind fixing his meals and doing his wash. Her neighbors and friends got to know him a little and agreed that he seemed okay.

Then, one day Margie didn’t go about performing her daily routines as she had done for decades. No one answered the door or the phone. Later that day, June 23, 2016, Sharron, Margie’s closest friend, showed up for her and Margie’s daily coffee and walk, but the door that was always open was locked. Sharron knew Gordon as well as anybody and saw the light was on in his upstairs bedroom and called out to him. He finally came to the window but only stared down at her. She called the police. The police arrived and after speaking with the neighbors and Sharron they decided to conduct a welfare check. They found Margie’s body on the kitchen floor, blood spatter everywhere and a bloody hammer near the body. After speaking with Gordon, he was arrested on Suspicion of Murder. After an investigation and trial found Gordon guilty of murder he was sentenced to life in prison, where soon after he was also murdered.

In May 2017, less that a year after Margie’s murder, Sharron was in her kitchen removing an item from a high cupboard shelf, lost her balance and fell with her head crashing into a wall. Her husband got home minutes later and found her lying on the floor in obvious pain. She could barely tell him what happened and he rushed her to an Emergency Room in Bellingham, some forty miles away, where Sharron was pronounced ‘DOA’. Were there closer ERs? Yes, much closer. Then less than six months later Sharron’s husband was showing off a new girlfriend around town and they married less than a year after Sharron’s death. The townsfolk of the whole Lyman area were aghast. As were Sharron’s sons and their families.

Kay, the remaining friend, now living in Chicago, had unexpectedly lost her two lifelong friends in less than a year, and both under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Then, relatively lost and devastated that she never got to say good-by to Margie or Sharron or attend either funeral. For a while Kay waved both hands toward the sky every time she thought of them. Some people thought Kay was praising God and joined her, but she was just waving “Hi” and “Good-by” to her friends.

And as you might expect, Kay decided to maybe stay out of the kitchen.