Grace and Grit (4 page)

Charles always said that he’d noticed me several months beforehand when for the first time I walked into Asberry Baptist Church one day wearing my red sling-back shoes. My family didn’t attend church, but I’d convinced my mother to let me go to the closest
church in our community. I was eager to get out of the house on Sundays and thrilled to wear the fancy heels I begged her to buy for the occasion.

Of course, I was more interested in seeing my friends than in being saved. Squirming on the hard wooden pew, I studied the women’s colorful hats in the pew in front of me instead of listening to the preacher. Charles was always more serious about church than I was. He took great pride in the fact that his grandfather, Reverend Holder, along with hill farmers from surrounding communities like Skull Mountain, Dry Bone Hollow, and Ant Hill, had built the one-room church made of stone.

It wasn’t long before we started dating. Living in a town the size of a frog pond, we didn’t have much to do. Most of the time, we went to the drive-in theater and stopped at Dairy Queen for a hamburger afterward. Sometimes we hung out at the cemetery, dodging through the graves, some dating back to the Civil War, to sit under the large oak tree smack-dab in the middle of all those headstones.

But as much as I adored Charles, there was another young man in my life. I grew up playing with my stepcousin Johnny, who was the son of Papa’s third wife, Beulah. Johnny was quite a bit older than I was, already a pilot in the air force. When I turned fourteen, he sent me a letter telling me I’d grown into the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. His flattery fired up my imagination. I’d never felt very pretty. In fact, in first grade I cried so hard for curls that my mother finally took me to Ruth’s Beauty Parlor, where she got her once-a-year perm. There the beautician wrapped my hair in steel curlers, their spikes digging into my scalp. She covered my head with a thick milky-green shampoo before she hooked me up to a silver octopus whose electric legs transformed my plain pageboy into perfect Shirley Temple curls.

Inspired by Johnny’s letters, I dreamed of traveling the world with him, asking my mother every day after school, “Has the mail
come?” I’d moon over the framed picture Beulah gave me that I kept on my dresser. As I admired his smooth face, his expression so serious, I imagined him flying fighter planes in Korea. In my reverie, I saw myself an officer’s wife, entertaining other officers’ wives.

When Charles would visit, I hid Johnny’s picture in my top drawer even though he never went into my bedroom. The truth was that my daydreams about Johnny were a kind of comfort to me. I worried that Charles still pined for his first girlfriend. Her mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, and when her daddy hassled Charles so badly, afraid the same thing would happen to his daughter, Charles moved on. My fears proved to be true when he started dating her again during his first year at Jacksonville State University when he and I didn’t see each other as much. Finally, he broke it off with her for good, and we started dating exclusively.

Meanwhile, I’d finally come to my senses about Johnny. He was halfway across the ocean most of the time, and when I saw his sisters around, they insisted that he was dating dozens of beautiful girls. I finally realized that I didn’t know the first thing about love if I was moping around for someone I barely knew anymore. We’d simply played together as kids. What I loved had nothing to do with him: I loved the idea of him and my fantasy of living in exotic places.

Living out in the country, I didn’t know the ways of the world. What I knew about sex I overheard my uncles teasing about at Aunt Lucille’s dairy farm or learned from my friends in the locker room at school. When I discovered I was bleeding for the first time, I was terrified. Without a word, my mother handed me torn bedsheets.

But despite my lack of worldliness, I had my secret ambitions. Even though most girls, if they weren’t already married, worked in the cotton mills or became secretaries after graduation—the really smart ones studying to become teachers or nurses—I wanted to be
a lawyer when I was in high school. Where my aspirations came from I haven’t the foggiest, since we didn’t keep a single book in our home.

Later, encouraged by my math teacher Mrs. Self, I decided I wanted to be an engineer. In class I marveled at the fact that she could catch a mistake before a student finished solving an equation on the blackboard. I whizzed through my math tests, the purple ink always damp, emanating a strong, almost skunkish smell from the mimeograph machine. For me, calculating numbers felt like listening to my favorite music.

Mrs. Self also happened to play bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Gray, the most educated couple I knew. On Saturdays they drove from Jacksonville to our house to buy fresh butter. When I heard the sound of a car in the driveway I’d peer out the window to see Mr. Gray, a retired chemistry professor, behind the wheel of his red convertible, his bow tie somehow still neatly tied. I wondered if he slept in it. He was so different from my uncles, more like my history teacher, a slim, energetic man the boys made fun of for living with his two aunts and walking to school carrying an umbrella.

Sometimes I was invited to the Grays’ house in town. Eating dinner in their formal dining room, I worried about which fork to use as I tasted unfamiliar dishes like asparagus casserole served on delicate, rose-patterned china. I recalled what Granny Mac said about how my father had the finest of everything and drank from crystal glasses at their mahogany dining room table. My father’s father, who’d been a foreman for Southern Railroad, supervising the black crew fixing the railroad tracks, sounded downright rich. Returning a gun he borrowed for Granny Mac to keep for protection while he traveled all over Georgia with his crew, he accidentally shot himself in the groin as his wagon bounced over the tracks. Gangrene killed him. After his death, Granny Mac packed up all the fancy furniture and fine china—except for a tea set she
now kept in the trunk under her bed—and moved with my father to Aunt Lucille’s farm in Alabama, where she kept most everything stored away.

When it came to my education, it was Mrs. Self who had hopes for me, and she asked Mrs. Gray for help. She wanted Mrs. Gray to convince my mother to let me take college courses at Jacksonville State University, a teachers’ college only a short walk up the hill from Jacksonville High School, half the day during my senior year. Mama said no, of course. It cost too much. Anyway, a high school education was all a girl needed. So my senior year, at my mother’s insistence, I took home economics instead of earning college credits, almost failing my sewing assignments.

I’ll never forget the sting I felt when the week before graduation, the principal stopped me in the hall and congratulated me for being near the top of my class of one hundred. On the way to class, I was sick to my stomach, as if I’d swallowed a bottle of castor oil.

I found my way around most of my mother’s objections, but I didn’t know how to work around that conundrum. I’ve often speculated about how different my life would have been if I’d gone the eight miles down the road to Jacksonville State University. Later, when I went to work, I took every seminar and training class I was offered. But it wasn’t the same.

N
OT LONG
after I realized I couldn’t go to college, I took the picture of Johnny and gave it back to Beulah. I wrote him my last letter. I didn’t know Johnny the way I’d come to know Charles, a steady worker and a churchgoing man. Johnny was a figment of my imagination. I’d seen Charles, calm and competent, steer a school bus from slipping off an icy bridge. Charles was the one who taught me how to drive. We circled the school parking lot in his Chevrolet or blew down the white road made of chert gravel in front of my house, a trail of milky dust fading behind us. It didn’t matter what we did or where I went with Charles. We always enjoyed each
other’s company. Being with Charles made me forget how lonely I was as an only child. And on some level I knew he was the one, the way you just know some things, deep in your soul.

During my senior year Charles dropped out of Jacksonville State University to take a full-time job at General Electric, located about twenty miles outside Possum Trot, so that he could earn a steady paycheck. The last thing he wanted to do was farm for a living like his father, Willis. When relatives provided Willis, an illegitimate child, a place to live on their farm, he was treated as an outcast. While the rest of the family ate supper, Willis fed the cows and pigs. Later, Willis treated Charles almost as harshly on their family farm. I knew Charles admired the fact that my father wasn’t a farmer and respected his job as a diesel-tank mechanic.

Once Charles was employed with a decent salary and benefits, he bought from his aunt Sudy a piece of land, located several miles from my house. Then he immediately started building our home. By December of my senior year the walls were dried in. I don’t remember Charles ever formally proposing. We just talked about it like we did everything else. At least part of the reason we decided to get married when we did was that we could afford it.

The day I told my mother I wanted to marry Charles, I was sure she’d pitch a fit. I wasn’t used to her saying yes to anything I wanted. And in this case she needed to agree, as I was still a minor. In my heart, I wanted more than anything to marry Charles. There was hope: He was the only boy of the few I’d dated whom she’d liked, and she appreciated the fact that Charles was such a hard worker.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and tried to gather my courage. I waited until she was in the middle of cooking fried apple pies; that way I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. Then I told her, fast and to the point.

When she turned away from the black skillet and looked at me, she simply asked, “Are you sure?”

I nodded. I was seventeen. I was ready.

She finished frying her first batch of pies, then made me sit down at the wooden table. “You know, what you see is what you marry. What you see across the table won’t change all those years you’ll be married, so don’t think you can change another person,” she said.

I sat silently, sweating in the warm kitchen. Grease dripped down the side of the black skillet on the stove. Now I had nowhere to look but straight into her eyes.

“I suppose now you’ll have someone else to count on besides me and your daddy,” she said. Then she stood up. “If that’s what you want, I’ll sign the papers.” She turned to start chopping more apples for her next batch.

It was that matter-of-fact. She didn’t even have to discuss it with my father. I was more than a little stunned. I had been ready for a fight. Instead, I wanted to jump up and dance, but I sat at the table for a minute trying to contain myself and figure out how to say thank you. When Mama started frying the next batch, I stood beside her, chopping the rest of the apples in silent gratitude, picturing the whole time what my own kitchen would look like.

O
NE COLD
afternoon when school let out for the Christmas holiday, I got married. Charles picked me up at school and rushed me home to change. My mother had taken me shopping earlier in the week and helped me find my dress. It was perfect. In my bedroom, shivering a little, I pulled the glistening navy dress over my body. Pinning my hat on my head, I looked at myself in the mirror above my dresser, my face blurred behind the silver netting sprinkled in rhinestones. I touched my white collar, all stitched in pearls. I felt important and grown-up. I grabbed my pocketbook off the bed, ready to show Charles how wonderful I looked. Then I thought of my mother; I wanted her to see me, too, to recognize me as all grown up. I stood still, listening for her in the kitchen. It was silent.
Charles was waiting in the car, so I took one last look at myself, trying shake off my disappointment that my mother hadn’t been there to see me off. I didn’t expect my parents to come to the wedding. No one in my family had been married in a church, and my mother had made sure I understood that this occasion warranted the least amount of expense and attention. I guess Charles’s parents felt the same way, because they didn’t come either.

On the way to the preacher’s house, we picked up my cousin Louise and my friend Carolyn, who giggled all the way there. On the surface it felt like just another outing with friends, except that I was so dressed up and excited. When the preacher opened the door, he was still wearing the dirty coveralls he wore driving his peddling truck to sell flour and seed. He told Charles and me to take a seat on his sofa in the living room. I thought he was going to make us wait while he changed, but he just stood in front of us and started preaching.

“Now look each other in the eye and hear what I have to say.” Louise and Carolyn stood behind him smiling almost as much as I was. Our smiles disappeared pretty quickly, though, when it became clear that we were in for a sermon. I could see my friends’ eyes turn gradually toward the window to the pastor’s tree-lined yard as they braced themselves. My mind wandered back to the times when Louise and I were little, how we liked to go to the nearby Congregational Holiness Campground to watch the holy dancing in the wooden tabernacle, whitewashed a dull white like the concrete bunk buildings surrounding it. Later, when we played in the woods, she stood on top of uprooted pine trees, blown over by recent tornadoes, and acted like the preacher while I swayed my hands in the air singing “Jesus Loves Me.”

The preacher snapped me out of my reverie when he asked, “Have you thought this through?” and paused for our response. A shock went through my body, a startling sensation as strange as hitting your funny bone. When we didn’t answer right away, he
said, “Marriage is a lifelong commitment. Once you’re married, it’s for eternity. You will have to look at the world differently. When you’re married, you’re no longer an individual, but part of a whole. The marriage, not yourself, comes first.”

All of a sudden I didn’t want to look Charles in the eye. I could get lost in those blue eyes, usually full of comfort and promise, but in that moment I felt I needed to separate myself. The preacher’s forceful words unsettled me. I was glad the netting covered my face. The words he used, like
covenant
and
sacrament
, sounded ominous. Now I felt like a mischievous schoolchild being scolded by the principal rather than the dressed-up, grown-up woman I’d been looking at in my mirror.