Grace and Grit (15 page)

For weeks at the hospital, Vickie and her husband, Bill, never left Will’s side, supported by their company’s generous attitude toward family illness. Almost every hour, a nurse took Will’s blood, his arms as torn up as if a desperate chicken had raked its claws across them. It got so that the minute Will saw a white coat walking through the door, he’d start screaming, and we’d have to restrain him. The doctor sent each blood sample to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta so they could recommend which antibiotic to try next.

To our relief, Will finally beat the infection. To my disappointment, I did not live up to the promise I’d made when he was born. My work schedule wouldn’t let me. I’d started working at Goodyear again, and I was willing to let down my family because I was more concerned with satisfying Goodyear.

A
FTER TRAINING
at Tyson for nine months, the day I was supposed to start as a manager there, Goodyear called. They wanted me back. The economy was picking up, and with increased production they were in hiring mode. The pay was twice what I was
making at Tyson; and because I hadn’t been laid off longer than fifteen months, I was able to keep my seniority, accumulated sick and personal days, and benefits.

I couldn’t say no to the better pay, and I rationalized that I had no other choice but to go back to earn more than double what I made at Tyson. In hindsight, I see that it’s never that simple. You always have choices. I returned, driven to be recognized for my hard work and commitment, and I had given Goodyear the power to define me and my self-worth. But even more, Goodyear felt like home, and like the child of an alcoholic who marries an alcoholic, I gravitated to what felt familiar, an environment defined by fear and conflict, much like other parts of my life had been.

I knew what I was returning to, but my ability to tolerate what most people would find intolerable was pretty high, and I believed, a victim of my own highly efficient coping skills, that I could handle anything thrown my way. I minimized the negative experiences, gave significant play in my mind to any gesture or word of kindness, and normalized much of the Goodyear politics and policies. Often, however, I’d feel strangely detached from my reality, as if I were an outsider watching myself. My body, always poised in a heightened state of defense, finally started falling apart. Only then did I start to see the truth of the situation. My stubbornness kept me from realizing that you don’t have to live a robotic, white-knuckle existence; you don’t just have to survive. You can live a life full of grace.

How different my path would have been had I taken the Allstate job—especially when they were more than willing to hire me without an MBA, since I’d scored so well on their test. To this day the woman who started running the Jacksonville office at that time still works there. She couldn’t have had that many sleepless nights worrying about where her next commission check was coming from.

B
ACK AT
Goodyear, I was assigned to the glass house in the mill room, where the banburies mix rubber. I worked with one other person and was in charge of overseeing the setup operation for the banburies. Around four hundred pounds of rubber, carbon, sulfur, and a secret mix of additives are dumped into each banbury mixer, which creates a thick, black ooze. Steel rollers squeeze the ooze to continue the mixing process and eliminate any trapped air within the rubber—a process that sounds like fireworks going off. The rubber is then folded back and forth in a zigzag manner. Where I was working, there were guys on the floor, but I had no support staff and dealt mainly with the ongoing and offgoing shifts of truckers.

The union guys liked to say that working in the mill room would turn me into an old lady overnight. There were the endless skin problems, and every day was a bad-hair day. At the end of my shift I looked like I had greased my body with cooking oil and sprinkled myself with black baby powder. I wore a military cap with earflaps, but my blond hair turned a light shade of green anyway. No matter what creams I used, my neck stayed blistered. One guy’s throat would get so irritated by the rubber poisoning that the inside looked like raw hamburger. Another guy couldn’t get rid of the runny sores covering his arms, and someone else had the poisoning so badly that the chemicals turned the whites of his eyes gray. The doctor who gave me cortisone shots on a regular basis for my burned skin told me, “I don’t know what that job pays you, but it’s not worth this.”

Of course, none of us went to the company hospital or requested being moved, because we feared losing our jobs. I took to wearing a turtleneck with my gray coveralls to cover my blistered skin. To keep the smell from suffocating me, I sprayed myself with
much too much Eternity perfume before I started my shift, focusing a stream on the edge of my turtleneck so I could bury my nose in it every once in a while and inhale deeply.

I
ENDURED
the challenges at work by looking forward to the thrill I experienced dancing and competing in one showcase or competition after another. I spent as much time planning what to wear as I did practicing my moves. At each showcase, I scouted the costumes the other women wore. Sabrina would design elaborate costumes for me, and she and I would shop for all types of material—sequined, satin, chiffon, fringed—to bring to a seamstress in Hoke’s Bluff who sewed them.

Charles eventually realized the fun he was missing and joined me at the dance studio. It struck me that taking lessons and stepping out of his role as a deacon and a sergeant took everything Charles could muster. One rainy afternoon right when he was supposed to start his first lesson, I was running late for my own lesson, and I came across him sitting alone in his car in the parking lot. He must have forgotten his umbrella. I knocked on his window. He rolled it down.

“You can share my umbrella.”

He shook his head. “I’m not going in yet.”

I pointed at my watch. “What in the world are you doing, then?”

“Finding my courage,” he said.

To learn the moves, Charles took notes in a brown spiral notebook so he could study them later. He soon discovered what I’d always known: He had a great sense of rhythm. At home, for entertainment, we’d play Frank Sinatra on the stereo or pop a cassette tape into the boom box and fox-trot across the living room floor. Typical Charles: He started dragging home mirrors people discarded in the alley near our house, planning one day to line the garage with them so we would have our own private dance studio.

W
HILE
I worked in the mill room, my father was dying. When he’d finally decided to retire almost ten years earlier, I’d just started at Goodyear. He’d wanted to retire earlier than he did, but Edna wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t even let my father rest on the weekend—she’d have him mowing the widowed women’s grass while she baked her cakes to take to them after he finished. It always amazed me when she’d sit in her rocker on the porch during her treatment for mouth cancer and talk about everything she needed to do. The minute she overcame the cancer, she got right back to her long list of chores.

The day my father went to the doctor shortly after his retirement, I drove with him. On the way to his car when the appointment was over, he didn’t say a word.

I got into the passenger seat, and he started the engine. I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What did the doctor say?”

He took the pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. I expected him to light his cigarette.

He placed the pack that I’d never seen him without since I was a child on the seat between us. “I have emphysema.” He didn’t say another word on the drive to his house. My mind swirled back to the times he drove me, snuggled against him, into Piedmont on Christmas Eve to pick out a present before the stores closed. Sometimes on the way home, he let me hold one side of the steering wheel. I was never afraid as long as he was there to lean on.

He left the cigarettes on the seat when he got out of the car. I waited a minute to go in and talk to Edna, watching a flock of cedar waxwings, drunk on the red berries, dive in and out of a stand of hollies in the neighbor’s yard. I crushed the pack in my fist, the cellophane crinkling, and followed my father into the house.

He’d been smoking a pack a day since he was fifteen. In his remaining years, he never touched another cigarette.

E
DNA MIGHT
have forced my father to work longer than necessary, but she also prolonged his life by feeding and caring for him. His last two years, attached to an oxygen tank, he could barely breathe, much less walk. I had to force myself to visit him because it undid me so to see him sick.

The day he died I’d gone to check on him and found him sitting in his favorite easy chair. He motioned for me to sit down on the sofa; it looked as if the skin on his arms was made of parchment, about to peel away as easily as the outside of an onion. His coloring was ashen, his breathing labored. A tray table with some untouched tomato soup and crackers sat next to him. On the nearby card table, he’d laid out his game of solitaire. Seeing the unfinished card game, I remembered how he used to play Rook with Louise and me; he was the only adult we knew who took time to play with us.

I called the doctor. He said I could call an ambulance or keep my father at home; he’d just been in the hospital over a week. I didn’t want him to die at home, leaving the memory of his death lingering with Edna as her only company. I called an ambulance and jumped into his unwieldy brand-new 1988 Oldsmobile—what I liked to call his “two-bedroom car.” I followed as fast as I could, my hands slipping on the steering wheel from the baby oil Edna rubbed on his arms to soothe his slack skin.

As fast as I drove, I didn’t make it in time. He died as they transferred him from the gurney to the hospital bed. I was devastated that I didn’t have a chance to let him know one last time that I loved him.

I couldn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I had to stay strong for my mother as we tended to the expected and unexpected matters of death. I spent countless hours dealing with the fact that he’d been buried on the wrong side of my parents’ two plots. He was
buried on the left, not the right. As is the custom standing at the marriage altar, the man is on the right and the woman on the left. To make matters worse, the headstone was placed on the empty grave where he should have been—and the company that made it had gone bankrupt, ruining any chance we had of correcting the problem.

For six months after my father died, I drove by the cemetery every morning after work. I’d park the car on the edge of the grass. Sometimes I’d sit by his grave, which faced east, aligning my father with the face of God on Judgment Day. The area where he was buried was still bare of grass, but the morning air was free of traffic fumes. I thought about how mild-mannered he was. I’d always been a picky eater as a child, and it sent one of my uncles over the top when I left food on my plate. He’d cuss me at table for not eating, saying, “You’re just as finicky as your crazy father.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Now I understood that it was the simple fact that my father was so unfamiliar to men like Papa and my uncles—he didn’t talk ugly about women, and he never used the
n
-word like they did.