Toledo 1942: We Were There Yesterday

Loved ones embark, families work overtime, and air raids stoke a national paranoia. In a working class neighborhood, teenagers, Sidney Graham meets her best friend Brook Cleveland one night. Fearing their separation, Brook devises a ritual to call up the dark powers. She promises will make them sisters and grant any wishes. Extracting their blood, Brook mixes it with whiskey. After drinking, they state their wishes to the dark powers. Sidney wishes her mother Ida would be less strict and her sister Olympia, 18, kinder. Brook prays her mother, a Catholic, be cured of cancer, then adds curses of Sidney's mother, sister, and their new Catholic neighbor Alanna, a veteran's daughter. Later Brook's mother dies, she regards the ritual as useless. She leaves Toledo with her sister to live near an army base. Sidney steals money to pay for Brook's to return and undo the curses that seem the cause of her mother's crazy behavior. At school, Sidney helps Brook cheat on homework. When the teacher confronts them, Brook confesses. Believing Alanna tattled, she shoves her into the ravine after school. Rescuing her, Sidney falls, hitting her head. Expelled, Brook returns to her sister's. Recovering Sidney returns to school, a heroine. At Thanksgiving, relatives gather at the Graham's for dinner. Ida announces she's has a license and a job as an ambulance driver. By December, her mother is imagining spies are everywhere. Olympia leaves college and travels to New York to be with her lover, who's embarking. Ida imagines a Nazi abducted her. Sidney's Saturday art classes with Alanna are usually an escape, but this day the mummies haunt her. One morning Sidney wakes, hearing her father sobbing. Ida drove off with his 1935 Pontiac to free Olympia from sex slaves. A sheriff's deputy phones--Ida's crash in Erie, fought them, and is jailed. Red Graham, agrees to commit Ida to the asylum. In mid-February, on a school trip to the Toledo Zoo, Alanna and Sidney leave their group. Sidney wants to go to Confession. When she tells the priest she blames herself for her mother's insanity. He advises prayer, love, and take Communion in her church. Early in March, Sidney persuades her father to go to church, then she confesses. He forgives her. With Ida in a rehabilitation unit, he decides to go to New York City to Olympia's wedding. It's spring and Sidney's father says it's time to celebrate Ida's recovering and her sister's marriage. The wait at Union Station for the New York Central train to load baggage and board passengers. With servicemen and all loaded, Sidney and her father go to their coach. As the train steams off, they look out as they pass over the Maumee River to East Toledo farms, where Ida grew up. He suggests they enjoy the scenery. After dinner, she curls up against him and naps to the rhythm of the wheels. The wedding and New York City lie ahead. Her mother's recovery to come.