A Fighting Chance (4 page)

I headed straight for the money courses. I started with contract law and over time added business and finance courses. I loved the idea of mastery over money. Besides, these were some of the most technical, complex areas of law. I figured that if I could manage this, no one could question whether a young woman with two little children belonged here, even if I looked like someone’s idea of a school nurse.

That first year of teaching law school took my breath away. I loved the classroom. I watched faces, and it felt like a victory every time I saw the
click!
as a student grasped a really hard idea. I was doing my best to stay just one step ahead of the students, and new ideas seemed to race through my head a million times a second. We were making something happen in the classroom. We were growing brains. We were growing futures.

But the new job was hard, and at home my world was stretched to the breaking point. I traded car-pool duties, took my turn as a Girl Scout leader, taught Sunday school for the fifth graders, and made cookies for bake sales, but I could never catch up. I kept a calendar in the kitchen, and I hated to look at it. I felt as though I had this giant pile of duties balanced on my head as I rode a wobbly bicycle on a high wire stretched across a canyon. The slightest mishap—the dog got loose or the car wouldn’t start—and we would all go crashing down.

Jim and I never argued. He didn’t say much about my job, but he always looked at his watch when dinner wasn’t served on time or when I sat up late at night grading exams. I thought he felt I had reneged on our unspoken deal that he would work and I would take care of the house and children. I also thought he was right.

I kept pedaling faster, but child care brought me down.

It was a Tuesday, winter in much of the country but warm and sunny in Houston. My classes were over for the day, and I hurried to the car. I needed to get to the child care center in the strip mall to pick up Alex. It was a little past five, but the center was still full. Alex was sitting on a small cot. When I saw him, he didn’t run over to me. He just sat and looked at me. I felt my chest tighten.

He was a beautiful child. Big for his age, sturdy, with blond hair, dimpled knees, and huge brown eyes.

I picked him up. His diaper was soggy, and I tried to lay him down on the cot to change him, but he clung to me and cried. I gave up and carried him to the car. By now, he was going full force, crying louder and kicking. I had tears, pee, and baby snot on my blouse.

By the time we got home, he was exhausted and so was I. I called our neighbor Sue and asked her to send Amelia home. I gave Alex a bath and started crumbling up hamburger in a skillet as I made dinner. I put in a load of laundry.

When I was in law school, Amelia and I had been buddies. She allowed me to believe that a life that combined inside and outside—family and not family—could actually work. But Alex cried for hours at a time, turning red and sweating and seeming to be furious at my inability to fix whatever was wrong. Once I started teaching, mornings were torture. Alex knocked his cereal bowl across the room and cried when I dressed him. He kicked me while I tried to fasten him in his car seat and clung to me when I needed to leave. He was heavy and strong for a toddler. I was outmatched.

I was so tired that my bones hurt. Alex still woke up about three every morning. I’d stumble out of bed when he cried, afraid he’d wake Amelia or Jim. I’d feel around in the dark, wrap us together in a blanket, and then rock him back and forth in an old rocking chair I’d had since I was a kid. We held each other, and for a while each night while I drifted in and out of sleep, I prayed that he forgave me for my many shortcomings.

But on that Tuesday night, I couldn’t forgive myself. I knew the day care place wasn’t good. Alex had been there only a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t quite say why. Maybe it smelled funny. Maybe the people weren’t friendly. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t working.

I’d been teaching only a short time, but I had cycled through one child care arrangement after another. The pain of each transition was intense. Each represented a failure. A sitter who never showed up. A neighbor who changed her mind. A child care center that left Alex in dirty diapers all day. I knew I was failing my son.

One night after I had put both kids to bed, Aunt Bee called. By now, she was in her late seventies. She asked how I was doing. I said, “Fine,” and then abruptly started to cry. “I can’t do this. I can’t teach and take care of Amy and Alex. I’m doing a terrible job. I’m going to have to quit.”

I hadn’t even thought of it until I said it: Quit. Once I started to cry, it was as if something inside me broke. I cried harder.

Aunt Bee, one of my mother’s older sisters, had been born in 1901 in Indian Territory, before it became the state of Oklahoma. She was short, with an ample bosom and small, arthritic hands. From her teens, she had worked variously as a secretary, a typist, and a clerk. She had lived with my grandparents on and off, pitching in her paycheck to the household budget. She was a highly independent woman in every way except one: she never learned to drive. As a young woman, she’d gotten a driving lesson in my grandfather’s old Model T, and she had run over a wild turkey. Fifty years later, she still teared up when she told the story. After that, she swore she’d never drive again—and she hadn’t.

“Bee” was short for Bessie Amelia, and when my parents had a baby girl, my mother said she would be named Bessie. Aunt Bee was tickled, but she asked my mother to name me “Elizabeth” and use “Betsy” for short. Aunt Bee carried me home from the hospital, wrapped in a pink blanket with a pink satin ribbon tied in my dark hair. She bought me two new dresses each year—one for Easter and one for the first day of school. She never had children of her own. In her fifties, she had married Uncle Stanley, a butcher at the meat packing plant. Now she was a widow.

That night on the phone, Aunt Bee listened to me fall apart. She didn’t try to soothe me or tell me it would be all right. Instead, she let me cry and cry.

After a while, I wound down. I blew my nose and got a drink of water. Aunt Bee said calmly, “I can’t get there tomorrow, but I can come on Thursday.”

It took me a moment to understand what she was saying. She never even asked. She just walked away from her life so she could come fix mine.

Two days later, I drove to the Houston airport to meet the late afternoon flight from Oklahoma City. Aunt Bee had arrived with a Pekingese named Buddy and seven suitcases. She and Buddy lived with us for several months, both of them sleeping on a pull-out couch.

At last I was able to breathe again. It was as if someone turned off the Tilt-A-Whirl we had been riding, and life stopped spinning.

A Marriage Fails

But it didn’t fix things between Jim and me. I had failed him. He had married a nineteen-year-old girl, and she hadn’t grown into the woman we had both expected. I was very, very sorry, but I couldn’t change what I had become. I was supposed to be the Betty Crocker award winner, but I set things on fire. I was supposed to be 100 percent focused on our home and our children, but I was making a life outside that neither of us expected. I loved every new adventure I took on—and he didn’t.

One night I’d left the dishes until after I’d put both kids to bed, and I was cleaning up in the kitchen. Jim was standing in the doorway, smoking a cigarette, just looking at me.

I asked him if he wanted a divorce. I’m not sure why I asked. It was as if the question just fell out of my mouth. I was shocked that I’d said it.

Jim looked back at me and said, “Yes.” No hesitation, just yes. He moved out the next weekend.

Of course, no divorce is that simple. There were reconsiderations and some attempts at one-more-try-to-make-it-work. No one ever yelled or hurled nasty accusations, but once we had opened the door to divorce, we both knew what was coming.

After Jim moved out, I had to confront the hard truth: I had failed at the one thing by which I believed my life would be measured. And now my failure was out in the open.

I was determined to keep everything the same for Amelia and Alex. The children and I stayed in the same house, the same school, the same church. I still taught Sunday school and Aunt Bee made mashed potatoes.

Daddy was still working as a maintenance man, mowing lawns and keeping the heating and air-conditioning running in an apartment complex in Oklahoma City. He was sixty-seven, and the work was getting harder. But the job came with a free apartment, and he and Mother planned to hang on there as long as they could.

At some point during the back-and-forth of separating with Jim, I hatched a new idea: they could move to Houston. We could all pitch in—Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee could help take care of Amelia and Alex. With the money I would save on child care, I could help them with their expenses. They would have to leave Oklahoma, where they had spent their whole lives. But they could have a home of their own and be woven into my little family’s life. And I needed them.

So they came.

Jim paid child support faithfully, and I had a regular paycheck from teaching, but I was deeply worried about money. Mother and Daddy offered to move in with me, and I was grateful for the offer but terrified by the thought. I started balancing my checkbook obsessively, almost every night.

I had told Jim that he could take all the furniture in our bedroom, and I slept on a makeshift twin bed in a big, empty room. I gave him the pictures off the walls. I had a garage sale and got rid of the dining room table. I wallpapered Amelia’s room and painted a big rainbow on the wall in Alex’s room. It was an odd, herky-jerky sort of stripping down and rebuilding.

While I carefully put one foot in front of the other, determined to keep my life more or less the same, Jim went in a different direction. He quit smoking, lost thirty pounds, and took dancing lessons. Eventually, he met a very nice woman and remarried. We didn’t see him often.

New Lives

Unlike a lot of single mothers, I was lucky enough to have my family nearby. I still worried about money, but we managed the other day-to-day challenges more or less okay. Aunt Bee made peach cobblers and cheese grits, Mother took care of short trips to the grocery store, and Daddy picked up Amelia from piano lessons. Child care was finally under control—a kid with a fever no longer turned life upside down. Daddy was always tinkering with something, so we could even handle a car that wouldn’t start or a busted pipe.

My life hadn’t worked out exactly the way I’d expected, but I could breathe. The children were flourishing. My parents were happy. Aunt Bee told me that it was a blessing to be “nearly eighty years old and
so needed
.” I loved teaching. I thought I knew now what my life would look like forever: family and teaching. And that sounded just fine to me.

That summer, Mother and Daddy kept the kids so I could go to an intensive course for law professors who wanted to learn more about economics. Enrolled in the course were about two dozen professors from around the country, including one named Bruce Mann.

A lot of people might think that two young law professors would be drawn together because they wanted to talk about law all the time. Nope: I fell in love with Bruce because he had great legs. Really. The weather was hot, and people were wearing knit shirts and shorts. I spotted Bruce on the first morning. He was sitting in the row in front of me, with his chair turned sideways and his legs stretched out. Bruce is six feet three inches, most of that in his legs. Those legs seemed a mile long. Through college and part of graduate school, he had spent his summers teaching tennis. He was gorgeous.

By lunch on that first day, I’d found out who he was and what he had done before becoming a professor. I bounced up to him and cheerfully asked if he would give me tennis lessons. Long after our first meeting, Bruce admitted that he was appalled. “I was sick of giving lessons, especially to beginners. I wanted to teach legal history—not how to hit a tennis ball.” But he was polite, so I set up a time to meet him on the courts after that day’s last session, never noticing his lack of enthusiasm.

Mixed in with the tennis lesson, I learned all the basics: Bruce had both a law degree and a PhD in history, and his specialty was legal history, law in the age of the American Revolution. He was Yankee to the bone, the descendant of tough, quiet, hardworking people who had lived and died in Massachusetts for generations. Like me, he had gone to college on a mix of scholarships, loans, and part-time jobs. It didn’t take me long to figure out that we were very different people. If I was a hard-charging, go-to-the-mat-for-whatever-you-believe kind of professor, he was more of a scholarly, camping-out-in-the-archives-poring-over-an-old-legal-manuscript kind. I asked him if he’d give me another tennis lesson the following day.

Years later, over a great deal of beer, Bruce confessed that I wasn’t just pretty bad at tennis, I was terrible. I was his Worst Student Ever. I hit balls everywhere: over fences, over hedges, over buildings. Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had.

But Bruce loved me anyway. And when I proposed to him, he said yes.

Bruce tells his own version of how he fell in love with me, but I figure the details don’t really matter. I was completely crazy about him, and I still am. Even though I’m sure I’m hard to live with, he says he is crazy about me, too—he just says it more quietly than I do.

We faced only one problem back then: getting married made no sense at all. Bruce was a single guy finishing his second year as a junior professor at the University of Connecticut Law School. I had all the things that weren’t on his to-do list—two children, a red station wagon, and an extended family of Okies who popped in and out of my kitchen every single day. I loved what I had built, and I had no plans to leave Houston—ever.

Soon after we met, Bruce came to visit me in Houston. One morning, we went to the grocery store together. I stood beside him as he gazed at a big display of fresh strawberries.

“We can get those if you want,” I said.