Grace and Grit (5 page)

As the preacher carried on, I pretended to adjust my netting, worried that Charles could see my concern, wondering if he really loved me as he’d said he did. I reminded myself that everyone in the family had whispered that I was pregnant; otherwise, why would I marry before I finished high school? One of my aunts had marked her calendar, waiting for me to start showing. The preacher’s funereal tone of voice made me question what the rush had been anyway. I suddenly felt I might need some more time to think. Yes, he’d been my best friend for the past three years, and so I’d been convinced I knew Charles well. Until now. Did I know him well enough to bind myself to him forever? If Charles was thinking the same thing, he didn’t flinch. That reassured me a little, but I continued fidgeting to avoid looking him in the eyes. My head itched like I had a swarm of mosquitoes under my hat. When the preacher made us stand up and started the official ceremony, I thought I was going to faint. I could barely repeat my vows. I couldn’t help but think that if he had given us the same sermon the day before, I’d have backed out. As it was, I was dressed and we were already there. I decided we’d just have to follow through and hope it worked out.

In the car, it seemed that Charles had been stirred up by the preacher’s words after all. All the way to Atlanta, where we planned
to celebrate our honeymoon, we didn’t say a word. Neither of us even spoke up to say we needed to stop for a restroom break. When we got to the motel, we both ran straight to the bathrooms before even glancing at the man behind the desk or bothering to check in. It wasn’t until we stood in front of Rich’s department store, listening to Christmas music, admiring the winter wonderland and watching Mr. and Mrs. Claus wave to the shoppers, that our mood finally lifted.

W
HEN WE
returned from our weekend honeymoon, Charles still hadn’t finished building our new house, so we lived at my parents’ house. In the mornings I had to blink twice when I saw Charles, not Granny Mac, sprawled in the twin bed across the room from me. Granny Mac had moved in with my aunt Lucille, where she’d lived before. She was still nearby, but I secretly missed the sound of her bustling around in the early-morning light as she wrapped her long dark braid in a bun around her head. I’d forgotten how irritated I used to get when she rummaged through my belongings. Instead, I remembered all the times I was upset with my mother and Granny Mac sat me down on the bed. She’d scoot out her wooden trunk, tucked under her bed. Handing me a gold bracelet or her opal ring to wear, remnants of the life she lived before my grandfather left her widowed so young, she smiled and hummed as she set her hand-painted teacups on the quilt for us to play tea.

Now when I opened my eyes, Charles shared the bedroom I’d slept in since I was seven, its walls plastered with pictures of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. His large frame almost swallowed the small bed. On the weekends, Charles and I spent the night at his family’s house in his childhood bedroom, his younger brother and sister following us around and staring at us like we were aliens from Mars who’d landed in the cornfield.

After we married, I went back to school. The only difference in my routine was that when I came home in the afternoons, I joined
Charles, my father, and his uncles to help finish the house Charles was building for us. I completed my homework later in the evening, when it was too dark to work.

That April, the day I turned eighteen, we moved into our unfinished house. My mother rocked in her chair on the front porch and cried. Her tears took me by surprise. It was one of the few times I’d seen her cry. After all that fussing over the years, my mother didn’t want me to leave. And when I did, she’d expected me to move a stone’s throw from her like she did with Papa. I looked around one last time. The path I cut through the woods to Louise’s house would soon be overgrown with wisteria and sumac vines. I recalled how Louise and I used to make a game of throwing cotton bolls at each other when no one was looking. I thought about how much I’d miss my father, who loved to make a special treat of any occasion. Those trips to town on Saturday, he looked like a king dressed in his best suit and one of his dark felt hats. Before we left, he always slipped me a quarter to buy an Archie comic book and a Hershey bar at Watson’s Drugstore. I wondered what happened to the miniature doll bed he made me from apple crates—the one I used to stuff Buzz into—that Christmas Mama said there wasn’t any money for presents.

As I loaded my few belongings into Charles’s car, my eyes rested on Papa’s house across the road. He was one person I wouldn’t miss.

Driving away, passing fields that would be ready for planting soon, Charles held the steering wheel, his arms taut from years of farmwork and the last months framing our house. As I clasped the box holding Granny Mac’s fragile teacup set in my lap, I wanted to grab Charles’s arm and stop the car.

T
HE MORNING
Charles laid down the law, I sat on our bed in our bedroom, fully dressed and ready for school, my stomach clenched with anxiety. Charles was still in the kitchen finishing the ham and
biscuits I’d made for us before he set out for work and dropped me off at school on his way. I hadn’t eaten a bite.

Now I looked out the window at the dirt Charles had prepared for my flower garden. When I’d reminded him about the senior trip that morning at breakfast, he acted surprised. My trip was only two weeks away, and then there was graduation. I wanted to be with the friends I’d spent my childhood with before we went our separate ways.

“But you’ve known all along I wanted to go,” I’d insisted. Mrs. Self’s school trips were famous. I’d looked forward all year to seeing the White House and New York City.

“It’s not a good idea,” he’d said without emotion.

I could feel that familiar anger well up in me. It may have been his law, but it sure wasn’t mine. I’d worked hard for that trip. For weeks my father had driven me up every back road in Calhoun County to sell the second-most magazine subscriptions in my high school so that I could afford to go. I’d told Charles months earlier that I was going. Over breakfast, as he tried his best to eat his food while it was still hot, we went back and forth until, exasperated, he finally said, “You’re married now. Married people don’t go on trips alone.”

He meant married women. Surely, he wasn’t worried about the rowdy boys in my class who drove across the state line to buy liquor in Georgia every weekend. I suspected they’d misbehave as usual on the trip, but that had nothing to do with me. I remembered that Charles had made sure that I was indifferent when he made me throw out a silly necklace one of them had given me a long time ago. I sighed as the morning light streamed through the window, a strange contrast to my dark mood. Charles clearly expected me to be a “good wife,” and that meant I was to stay at home where I belonged.

But this wasn’t one of our ordinary squabbles over blankets or
thermostats. I hated the way, in the middle of the night, Charles, fast asleep, jerked the blankets to his side of the bed, leaving me with one thin sheet, shivering. It killed me when he changed the thermostat behind my back; he insisted on keeping it at 65 degrees, practically freezing me to death. Now I really felt left out in the cold. I so wanted to find a way through this. I thought and thought as I smoothed the bedspread over and over again, knowing I’d be late for school and Charles for work. And it hurt even more because I had to admit to myself that Mama was right this time. She’d told me when we were shopping for my wedding dress that Charles would never let me go on the trip. I didn’t believe her—why did he have to
let
me, anyway? I’d read the
Good Housekeeping
advice at Mrs. Gray’s house—that a good wife didn’t question her husband’s judgment because he is master of the house—but that wasn’t supposed to apply to me. Daddy had never told my mother what to do. And I felt like I could almost always get my way with him. If Daddy had nothing but a dollar left in his pocket and I wanted a steak, he’d buy it.

I called to mind the time I was determined to have a coat my mother refused to buy. One late afternoon right before my father left for work, I’d found him in the living room flipping through one of my comic books. Dressed in his denim pants and the white work shirt Mama starched as stiff as barn wood, he smelled like diesel fuel, a smell I’d almost come to like.

I sidled up next to him and asked him if he’d get me that coat I’d been talking about. He kept his money folded neatly in his pocket. He didn’t look up but turned the page, the palm of his hands calloused as hard as a butternut in places, the whites of his fingernails stained an indelible black from engine grease.

“Sugar, if you want that coat, I’ll get you that coat.”

It was August and hot as blue blazes outside, but I wore that coat every day. Mama was so mad that, for months, every time I turned around I found myself with more chores to do.

I got up from the bed at last and opened my closet door to look for that coat. Did I have any say-so in this relationship? Feeling the thick brown wool, I knew that even though I had my own money for the trip, I wasn’t in control of my life. Our ideas about marriage, specifically what it meant to be a wife, were as diametrically opposed as two magnets facing each other the wrong way. Suddenly I felt like a fool. I should have known that our different backgrounds would come between us. Religion and the traditional values that accompanied it loomed large in Charles’s family. He often reminisced about the Sunday picnics after church when the old folks gathered to gossip while the young folks played horseshoes the whole afternoon. His sister would tell how when they’d be sitting on the porch on Sundays and the preacher came by, Charles ran around slinging all the dirty dishes into the stove and stuffing the dirty clothes into the wringer washing machine.

Charles’s best memories centered on the church, his second home. My main memory of church was Mama complaining the few times we went about the reverend dipping into the church offerings to pay for his gas. And she had absolutely no patience for those snake-handling preachers.

Still in my bedroom a half hour later, I just couldn’t let go of that coat. I didn’t want to see Charles, never mind ride with him all the way to school. I knew he was patiently waiting for me, probably hoping I’d accept his decision if only he gave me time. He’d been clear that it was his decision to make. As he sat at our brand-new kitchen table, Charles had flat-out insisted, “If you loved me, you’d stay home.”

His eyes had widened in disbelief when I said, “If you loved
me
, you’d let me go.”

As I took my treasured coat out of our closet, I knew I was going to Washington no matter what Charles said or how upset he was. It was way too hot to wear that coat on a sunny spring day, but it was my shield, as it had been with my mother many springs
earlier. I put it on, ready to go to school, my blood still burning. In the car, Charles reminded me that a husband cleaves unto his wife; they become one flesh.

Now I understood the true meaning of my wedding sermon. When the preacher had said that the marriage would come first, he’d meant Charles would, and there’d be a price to pay if I didn’t submit.

I had only been in Washington one day when I called Charles at GE on the pay phone to check in. A coworker answered and told me Charles was on his way to the hospital in an ambulance; no one knew what had happened. I thought that maybe he’d had a heart attack, so I took the next train home.

At the time, Charles was running tubes in the furnace room, where it’s so hot you’re supposed to take salt tablets to keep from becoming dehydrated. Charles hadn’t taken them that day, nor had he drunk enough water. But he wouldn’t admit he’d gotten dehydrated on purpose. I knew in my gut that he’d done so in order to get me to come home early.

It took a long time for me to get over his stunt, and I wished a thousand times I hadn’t come home. I had always known that there’s one thing I hated more than anything else: being told that I couldn’t do something. Now I knew what was second on my list: being tricked and manipulated. In our first few months of marriage, Charles had crossed both lines.

N
OT LONG
after that, we argued over the hospital bill that we had to spend what was left of my trip money to pay. Night after night, while he read his Bible, I pretended to sleep, not wanting to talk or kiss him good night. I was stiff with anger. I felt as if my heart had closed.

One night, after about a week of this, I pulled the covers over my head extra hard and asked roughly when he was going to turn the light out.

He sighed. That irritated me even more. Finally, I heard him put his Bible on his bedside table, where he always left it. The room became quiet. We lay in silence, the only sound the cicadas’ crescendo outside our window. I thought about my uncle who’d told everyone we’d be separated in a year. I could feel sadness creeping in, softening me. I didn’t know how this was ever going to be resolved, but I was tired of being mad.

Charles pulled the covers from my face and leaned into me. I didn’t push him away. We found each other again in the dark.

“I don’t want you to be upset anymore. I don’t want to lose my best friend,” he whispered later.

Before we fell asleep, we promised we’d always talk through our troubles whenever we disagreed. Throughout our marriage, this pact served us well. After that night, no matter how angry we got with each other, one of us would back down and end the argument by reminding the other that we were best friends.

I began to realize that no one’s marriage is perfect; you just make the best marriage possible. My senior trip wasn’t the first or last time Charles got into his religious mode, thinking he was lord and master and forgetting that I was a real person. But I knew Charles loved me like no one else.

T
OWARD THE
end of my senior year, I interviewed at General Electric, where Charles worked. The Monday after graduation Charles and I drove to his friend’s house, where we carpooled with him and some other guys sixteen miles into the small town of Oxford. I clocked in at GE, thinking the sooner I started working, the sooner we’d be able to put a little more distance between us and the life I so wanted to leave behind. I was going to be like Aunt Robbie, who like many women during World War II had been hired in at Goodyear while the men were fighting the war.