Grace and Grit (21 page)

I’d never loved him more than in that moment.

T
HE FOLLOWING
morning, on the drive to Birmingham, Charles and I didn’t say much. To keep my mind off the task before me, I stared into the woods whizzing by, marveling at the blooming white dogwood trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of a deer. After a couple of wrong turns, we found the EEOC building downtown. Inside, we passed through security and walked into a crowded waiting room. I tried to find a vacant seat in the corner and settled on a spot in the middle of the room. I don’t like crowds, but Charles was worse. He didn’t sit down at all. “I’m going to get some coffee and a newspaper down the street,” he said before he hightailed it out of there.

I couldn’t blame him. The somber atmosphere felt the same as a hospital waiting room—everyone fortified for a long wait with newspapers and coffee. I glanced at the girl next to me. She was about Vickie’s age. I wondered why she was there. I pretended to read the
Time
magazine I picked up from the stack on a table but peered around the room instead. Each person there was waiting to tell her story. What were the experiences that had brought them all to this point? Were they similar to mine? Did they feel as nervous as I did? I couldn’t help but feel that we’d been thrown together by a natural disaster, united by default into a club I had no desire to join.

I flipped through the magazine and tried to read the article about the thirty-third anniversary of the Selma march in Alabama; I couldn’t concentrate, discouraged by the fact that Alabama only made national news for negative stories. The only positive press for the state highlighted Heisman trophy winners or national football championships.

Rifling through the magazine stack next to me, I recalled something one of my interviewers had said while I was training at Goodyear. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but on the drive into Birmingham it had popped into my thoughts with other bits and pieces of moments at Goodyear. Now his words kept running through my mind, stuck in my head like a bad song. The interviewer, one of the factory council members, wanted to know why I was at Goodyear when I should be home at the kitchen sink. Why was I at Goodyear looking for a job when Goodyear didn’t need women working there? he’d asked. That was such a long time ago, and I thought so much had changed in the world—until I found the note.

Over the years, I’d done exactly what the men had done: I’d climbed the two-story buildings in the mill room; knocked down the lampblack from the boxcar into the giant banburies; started the dangerous conveyors, as wide as one-lane roads, in the rain and the sleet. I’d made it alone; the handful of women
managers along the way had come and gone, quitting or having nervous breakdowns and seeking professional help. Good men like Bruce, the union representative who’d stood by me when I made the first EEOC claim in 1982, suffered when they stood up for the right thing. His integrity had cost him his position as the union rep; the following year he was defeated. I’d always regretted that had happened to such a decent person.

When my name was finally called, I met in a cramped cubicle with Ollie Crooms, the EEOC officer, an attractive, pleasant woman. In this confined office with a stranger, I relived my darkest moments at Goodyear. Over the course of several hours, without lunch or a restroom break, I recounted being blamed for a tire hold the day I returned from the week off in February when I took Edna for testing. I was never shown the actual tires or the printout with the wrong specifications. I was simply informed that I had made a $10,000 mistake, that they were deciding what to do about it, and that I’d probably be suspended. I knew there’d been one hold that year—someone had let the wrong lampblack get mixed in a batch of tires, which resulted in the scrapping of more than 76,000 tires—and that no one had been suspended for that.

Much of the time I talked, I was struck by the ugliness I was describing. Then that poor woman had to pull the more embarrassing details from me—the conversation was as painfully slow and halting as plucking a stubborn splinter deeply embedded in the flesh.

She needed to know the other details, like the unbelievable fact that when I challenged Jeff about his unfair audits, after so much that had happened so long ago, he’d actually asked me to go get a drink after work, starting up the same nasty behavior he’d demonstrated at my very first evaluation, when he asked me to meet him at the Ramada Inn. In our brief conversations with Eddie about my performance, I had intimated that Jeff’s remarks were inappropriate because my audit scores continued to drop after my refusal. Eddie
ignored me and I didn’t push the matter—I had enough of a challenge to try to make him see that I was being evaluated unfairly. Relaying these awkward and sordid details, saying out loud the incidents and remarks I had kept to myself for so long, I couldn’t help but feel like I had done something wrong to provoke the mistreatment. It was twisted, but I kept worrying that the EEOC officer would somehow think I had deserved my treatment at Goodyear. I guess that’s the nature of trauma: In order to make sense of it all, you tend to blame yourself.

At the close of the interview, Ollie was more upset than I was. “You do realize, don’t you, those guys were just messing with you all that time?”

I gathered my purse and stood up to shake her hand. “Yes, ma’am, I do. They’ve been messing with me for almost twenty years.”

O
NCE
I filled out the EEOC questionnaire, I didn’t feel any better about the whole situation. I was more anxious than I’d been before I had the interview. I’d felt compelled to take my stand, but now I was consumed by the same jumpy feeling that possessed me when I was in the house alone at night and I let my fears run away from me, convinced someone was hiding in the bushes outside the window about to break in. It was irrational, but I had a mixture of feelings, vacillating from anger to fear to worry that I’d opened a Pandora’s box. Mainly, I was resigned to the fact that there was nothing to do now but wait for the EEOC to investigate. That would take months. No matter what happened, I had to make it another year until retirement age when I was sixty-two and eligible for Social Security, though the actual thought of trying to work again overwhelmed me.

The long journey I’d embarked on that day in late March 1998 would be a lesson in the intricacies and convolutions of a complex justice system steeped in politics and inconsistencies. I had entered
the labyrinth, and I would be approaching my seventy-first birthday, more than a decade later, before I found my way out.

S
INCE MY
injury, I’d felt like I had a knife stuck in my leg. Shortly after my meeting with the EEOC, I was able to see the specialist. He performed an MRI that day and scheduled arthroscopic surgery the very next day. I took some time off work to heal and attend physical therapy. In a matter of a couple of weeks after my knee surgery, I was able to move around and walk with crutches. During those weeks at home recovering, I kept smelling something rancid in the house. I thought maybe a rat had died outside in the yard. I also couldn’t focus when I was reading the newspaper; I tried to work the crossword puzzles, but I forgot how to spell simple words. I couldn’t sleep at night, and when I did, I had nightmares. I kept dreaming that I was standing at the edge of a tall building, looking down weak with fear, knowing I was about to fall off. I woke up, my heart racing, unable to go back to sleep.

Then one morning I decided to get dressed and get out of the house. I felt someone staring at me as I ran a brush through my hair. I looked behind me. Charles was standing in the doorway of our bedroom, the book he was reading,
Left Behind
, still in his hand. He had a quizzical look on his face.

“What?” I said. “Why are you looking at me that way? Is there something wrong? Did I leave the coffeepot on again?” I kept forgetting to turn it off, along with leaving the garage door open at night.

He hesitated. Then he looked me up and down, from head to toe. “Is that what you’re wearing today?”

I took a quick look down at the navy sweat suit Vickie had bought me when she knew I needed something comfortable to wear after surgery. It had a couple of stains on it. I hadn’t felt like doing laundry, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed it.

I tried to brush the stains off with my hand. “I’ll wash it tonight,” I said.

“Lilly, how many days in a row have you worn that?”

His words gave me a zap, like the static shock I’d get from walking across the carpet in stocking feet and then touching the metal handle on the refrigerator door.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. He sat beside me.

“I’m worried about you, Lilly,” he said. “You’re not yourself lately.”

I looked down at my hands, rubbing the tips of my fingers where the skin was worn so smooth I no longer had fingerprints, something I’d discovered recently when updating my military pass. “It’s just going to take me a while to get back to my normal self.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

I studied the cover of Charles’s new book, which he’d placed beside him on the bed. He’d told me a little bit about it, how the Rapture had occurred, and people had disappeared from the face of the earth as a result. I didn’t like the ominous cover, a picture of the planet surrounded by darkness. I didn’t like Charles’s own doomsday tone either when he forced me to recognize that I wasn’t acting like my usual self, but I knew he was right. I couldn’t continue to function like I was, and he could only do so much to help me. It was time to ask for real help. I’d tinkered with the idea; a lot of people I knew went to see one particular psychiatrist in Gadsden, known as “the Goodyear psychiatrist.” When Charles and I finished talking, he reached below the bedside table and handed me the yellow pages. I looked up her phone number and scheduled a meeting with her as soon as I could.

S
INCE
I’
D
found the note, I’d been overwhelmed by a kind of shame I’d never felt before. In the safety and calm of Dr. Judy Cook’s office, for the first time in my life, I was able to talk about
my deepest thoughts and feelings. While my knee continued to heal slowly on my extended medical leave, I started to work on all the emotional damage I’d incurred.

At first, pieces of myself flaked away as easily as silver slices of mica, and I was afraid that in the end nothing would be left of me. Talking to a psychiatrist, another stranger, was unsettling, and for a couple of days after visiting her, I was convinced I felt worse, not better. But I’d bottled up my problems for so long, and once I’d said out loud to the EEOC officer the things I had experienced, I couldn’t return to sealing all those emotions away anymore. They’d overtaken me with a vengeance, and it was a relief to be heard. Bit by bit, I began to see how off-kilter my life had become, how cut off from myself I was. I faced the painful fact that I’d let Goodyear become the family I kept trying to please, neglecting my real family. I found that realization devastating, and I knew I needed to make amends to Charles and Vickie and Phillip.

A
BLE TO
drive again, I shuttled Edna back and forth to her radiation and chemotherapy at the hospital in Anniston. Edna, of course, was stubborn when it came to listening to the doctor. He’d warned her that getting out in the sun would harm her, but there she was, not long after he fussed at her for doing too much, standing outside in the middle of the yard in the blazing heat.

While Edna gave instructions about the grass, the yardman nodded, leaning against his silent lawn mower. The collar of Edna’s housecoat gaped open, her chest covered in burn blisters from the radiation. If I hadn’t been so disturbed by the sight of her once-beautiful olive skin charred as if from rubber poisoning, I would have laughed a little, remembering how aggravated she made Charles when he tried to cut her grass after we were first married. He finally quit.

On the way to her treatment, I tried to tell her that she was
going to make herself sick. “You have to do what the doctor says, or you’ll make yourself worse,” I insisted.

“Hush talking now. You’re giving me a headache.”

No, the sun had given her the headache, but Edna was used to being the caregiver, not the patient. I didn’t expect her to listen, because she always did things her way.

In just a few months Edna’s cancer had spread quickly, her health deteriorating at a disconcerting pace. In May she was hospitalized for pneumonia, and once she settled in at home again, I started spending the night with her. After a week, needing a break from sleeping on a lumpy sofa (better than the hard mattress in the guest bedroom), I decided to spend the night at home. I wanted to get some rest and clear my head. I’d gotten another call from Goodyear. They didn’t understand why I was taking so long to return, and indicated that the longer I stayed out, the more problematic my absence became. I knew I needed to get back into the swing of things, but I was worried about the doctor’s concerns—he’d warned me that if I returned to what I was doing, I’d be crippled in two years and need an entire knee replacement—and about asking for a lighter work schedule. I didn’t want to jeopardize my position by staying out too long, but I also didn’t want to return before I could handle what I was expected to do.

Before I could put my bag down in my kitchen, the phone rang. Edna said her temperature was 103. I rushed back to her house, thinking we were headed to the hospital for another long visit. In her bedroom, I shook the glass thermometer and then took her temperature. The red mercury line read normal.

“Edna, you’re okay. Everything is fine. It’s kind of stuffy in here. Maybe if I open a window, you’ll feel better,” I said, pulling back the curtains she’d drawn.

She grimaced a little as the sunlight flooded her bed. “You know I don’t like it so bright in here.”

“I know, but this breeze will cool you off. I’m going to go now, but I’ll turn on the TV before I leave so you can watch the news.”

“Don’t forget to water my pear tree. You forgot again. If it doesn’t get watered, it will die.” She’d had the yardman plant a fruit tree that spring, and all she could talk about was how much she looked forward to making pear preserves. I, on the other hand, was so wary about what was around the next corner, I didn’t even subscribe to magazines. Who knew what could happen in a year? “The watering can is in the garage,” she said. “What time are you coming back?” she asked as I fiddled with the TV.