One Hundred Years of Marriage (2 page)

“Tennis.”

“Good.”

Olivia was our golden girl, a blond beauty, tan, and athletic, whereas I was brunette, freckled and couldn’t get enthusiastic about playing anything in the broiling Oklahoma sun.

“Mama,” I said and pulled the dresser bench closer to the side of the bed, “didn’t Aunt Fel go through the Change? She’s your own sister. Wouldn’t she know what you should take?”

“Oh, Fel had a few hot flashes. We laughed. Felicity could always handle everything better than I could.” She put an arm behind to support herself, bowed her head and stared down at the bed. In the noontime heat she appeared to be melting.

“I could call her.”

“No. It’d just cause a big, you know.”

She was afraid Aunt Felicity would tell Grandma Vic whose angina would kick up if she knew her younger daughter was in trouble.

I took the plate. She’d eaten almost nothing.

* * *

“What are all those books?” Ernest asked after everyone else had gone to bed. He had a glass of milk in his hand and stood in the living room in his faded pajama bottoms. From where I sat in my usual corner under the yellow light of the floor lamp, I could watch through the bay window, and had already seen a midnight blue motorcycle slide silently into place under the elm trees that protected our street.

“It’s nearly twelve,” I said.

“You look dressed up,” he said looking at my Madras sundress.

“I’m thinking of turning in soon.”

“So, what’re you reading?” In the shadowy corner where he stood, his body was so thin, his chest so hairless, he looked like a turtle without its shell.

“This is Freud. I’m reading about hysteria.”

“Hysteria like laughing?”

I looked at my watch. “It’s long past your bedtime.”

“It’s summer.”

“Good night, Ernest.”

After the last sound from Ernest’s bedroom I waited another twenty minutes before I walked out the back door, down the driveway and climbed on the back of the motorcycle. Tom walked the cycle to the end of the block, and we glided off into the night, not stopping until we coasted to the back door of his boarding house on the other side of town. Inside the house, he carried me up the creaking back stairs, so we’d sound like one person to the ears of his landlady, who slept in a downstairs bedroom.

Tom and I had first met in church. He had that rock-solid masculine confidence and good humor small town Oklahoma could turn out when it wanted to. He’d been away in the army since graduating from the University and was now back finishing up law school. He was nine years older than I was, but his big grin and corny humor made him seem like a kid.

He laid me out on the bed and slipped off my flats. “So, how’re you doin’?” he whispered as he bent to set my shoes quietly on the floor. I smiled and shrugged, eager to get past the pleasantries he always insisted upon. “Your folks and everybody doin’ fine?” He knew my folks and liked them, and they liked him, but he hadn’t heard about Mother’s collapse, which let me keep my family separate from all that happened in this room. This patchwork quilt I lay on was for me a shaded pool within the flat, dry plain of my everyday life.

“Fine, fine, fine, Tom. We’re all just fine.” I was wet and jittery and weary from longing for him all day. He stood by the bed, leisurely assessing my frame, fitting his hand over my hip bone as though figuring how best to get a good grip.

That spring I had given up my virginity to Tom without nearly as much moral turmoil as I had anticipated. Then, and each time afterward, he provided a Trojan prophylactic and brushed away my offense at his forethought. “A good Boy Scout is always prepared, Patricia.”

Tonight the muscle in my stomach tightened, arcing me up to kiss him, but he wouldn’t be hurried. “Patticake, don’t rush us. This is part of it.” Laying one hand on my chest and another on my thigh to flatten me, he stood like a man at an ironing board, coolly assessing his work. I struggled against his pressing palms.

He frowned. “Is that nonskid lipstick?” Just like him to joke when I was getting desperate. Like a turtle on her back, I craned my neck. He liked to kiss, and I knew it. Light as a cat he could snuggle, must have been born knowing how, a gift from God like his dimples and his tidy body—just the right height for me—but this cool eye he was putting on made me want to scream. But just then I heard footsteps and jerked my head back to check the door hook he’d installed at my request. He cupped a hand gently over my mouth. Every thump and creak in that old house signaled the arrival of the police and Mrs. Pryor leading the Methodists, come to drag me away for my sinfulness.

The footsteps passed our door and went on down the hall. Mohammed, one of the hundreds of North African engineering students on campus, kept Mediterranean hours. I was safe, but the boundaries of my security here were wrecked. I rolled toward the wall, my hands over my hot face.

Tom did not protest or cajole. He was up, looking for something in his closet. He came back with an army blanket which he rolled and, with some fussiness, arranged as a pillow against the iron foot board, then, shifting me as though I were nothing more than a sack of feed, he lay himself down on the outer edge of the narrow bed facing me from the other end. I wrapped my arm around his sock feet to help anchor us to the little bed.

“Did you hear the one about the guy and girl sittin’ on the fence watchin’ the bull and the cow?” he whispered.

“What is it,” I hissed, “with you and the barnyard?”

He shrugged and lay his head to the side in a boyish way that always turned me on. “Gee, Patricia, I’m just not up to the classy taste of a county seat girl like yourself.”

“Come on. You’re going to be a lawyer in another semester.”

“You think lawyers have high minds?”

“Well, you can’t tell a joke like that at the country club.”

“That’s where I heard it. Professor Rutherford told it. Now the guy and girl are sittin’ on the fence watchin’ the ruttin’, and the guy says, ‘Boy, I wish I was doin’ that.’ And the girl says, ‘Go ahead. It’s your cow.’”

I clamped my hand over my mouth to hide a smile. “Oh, Lordy, Tom, are you just being naughty so I’ll scold you? Don’t make me be your mother.”

“Never, Patticake, never.” He rose up on his knees and took my ankles in either hand to drag me down the bed, pulling my head off the pillow, and spreading my legs. “Not what I had in mind,” he said.

* * *

Throughout the heat of July, Olivia, Ernest and I maintained scrupulous attention to our duties. When I wasn’t sitting by Mother’s bed or cooking, I read up on depression, menopause, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. I consulted the great thinkers I’d heard about as a freshman: Sigmund Freud, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, as well as
Ladies’ Home Journal.

Daddy, of course, went to work every day as City Engineer, served on the church finance board, and discharged his duties as Republican town chairman. At home he repaired the gutters, cleaned out kitchen drawers, and rearranged all the coils of wire and cable into a new pattern on the garage wall. It was hard for someone who’d commanded a whole battalion of men in Korea to settle for being in charge of so few people. He inspected our work, commended us for our performance, shined his shoes, brushed his suits and went to meetings. Sometimes I would see him standing before his highboy mirror carefully arranging his heavy graying curls. The last time I saw him so deeply involved in this activity while Mother lay right there in the double bed they shared, her eyes staring at the ceiling, desperate for relief, I had imagined myself clocking him with a monkey wrench.

* * *

For all my reading I still could not figure out how to help Mother. When I’d come in, her face would be a great puddle, eyes full, cheeks soaked and often panting from a wave of heat generated from inside her. She seemed to be trying hard not to move at all. God, for her was the Great Physician, and she believed if she lay still enough, prayed without demand, hoped without vision, opened her heart to Him, He would take mercy and raise her up. She read from a book entitled,
Let Go and Let God.
When she was sleeping, I slipped it from her fingers.

The only complete and sure cure for your bad nerves,

as you call them, is to relax in the hands of God and

know that He is now looking after your troubles, that

He is now guiding you into the quiet waters of inner peace.

The book shook in my hand. All my life I’d choked down such language and imposed it on others as I led devotionals at church. But now, standing beside her bed, seeing between her eyebrows the crease that didn’t smooth out even in sleep, I realized my mother’s strengths—determination, initiative, creativity—were being paralyzed by what amounted to religious knockout drops. Surely God didn’t want her mindless, helpless, in total surrender, not even taking responsibility for her own troubles. Surely ours was the God who helped those who helped themselves. I hid the book in the back of my closet.

When she stirred, I was standing there. I watched her hand search the bed beside her. “Have you seen my book?”

I spoke softly, trying to sound casual. “You know, Mama, the ideas in that book sound good, but maybe they’re for a person with another kind of problem, someone who’s too high on himself, arrogant, whose ego is getting between him and God’s will. Your poor little ego couldn’t get between you and a breeze.”

“No, no. I’ve been too proud,” she blurted, “trying to handle everything myself. For years I’ve been praying God would change Daddy, make him calm, a more loving person.” Her face broke, red and rubbery. “I’m the one who needs to change. I need to learn to wait on the Lord. God promised. Marcus Mapple says we underestimate God.”

“But maybe Rev. Mapple meant that another way.”

“Oh, please, darlin’, let me have the book. Please.”

All I’d ever wanted to be was the one who made her happy. Obediently, I went for the book and gave it to her. Her breathing calmed; she patted my hand to let me know it was all right to leave her alone. I felt dizzy as though spinning in a swing.

As I quietly slipped out of her room, Ernest burst in the front door, panting. “Patty, I need a ride! Fast! They’re unpacking a huge refrigerator in the alley behind the biology building.”

I grabbed my purse and keys. We piled into the Buick and sped off to the campus. Finding the thin slats needed for the canoe walls was getting harder and harder for Ernest, who searched alone through alleys and trash heaps. We got to the alley where he’d seen the refrigerator being unpacked, but the crate was gone. At the far end of the alley, we saw a huge trash truck turning the corner, noisily changing gears, accelerating, bearing away the precious building materials.

“Step on it!” Ernest yelled.

We were a mile out of town on a two-lane highway before I could pull alongside the speeding truck. Ernest hung out the passenger window, pushing his gangly body up high enough to be seen by the driver. “Stop! Stop! Please!”

The driver helped us rip the crate apart to get it into the Buick’s big trunk.

At home with a bundle of slats under each arm, I climbed up into the thick heat of the storage room. There, between the banks of taped-up boxes, cast-off toys and abandoned art projects, propped on sawhorses and old chairs, running fifteen feet long, was the skeleton of the Orange Crate Canoe. I was aghast.

“Big isn’t it?” Ernest said, beaming.

“Ernest, it’s huge. Did you know?”

He shrugged. “The plans made it look little. I thought, something just big enough for me. But look. We can all get in.”

I was looking at it, all right, and it was plain the swell of its widest part could never pass through the little door to the storage room. “Ernest, honey, it’s so hot up here. You must roast.”

“Yeah,” he made a tiny smile, embarrassed by his situation. “I take off everything but my underpants.”

“You don’t have to do this, work in all this heat. You could wait for fall or just chuck the whole project.”

“I wanted to, but Daddy said he’d be very disappointed if I didn’t finish what I started.”

“Have you shown it to him?”

“I’m waiting until I get some of the walls on.”

* * *

As I pushed through Freud’s
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,
reading and rereading the clinical language, looking up in the dictionary at least four words on every page, I’d grown more and more sure that this Viennese doctor wouldn’t give two hoots about the pressures on an Oklahoma woman. But when I came upon the line, “Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness,” I hugged that little library book to my chest. Mama was the perfect example. To her way of thinking, the role of women was to be a great sponge of aggression, just soaking up the poison men spewed out, thereby keeping the environment clean and safe for children. The problem was Mama was now over-saturated.

She’d always behaved as though The General’s temper, always so close to the surface, was her responsibility. She’d dance around, cooing and patting his sleeve—”Now Cecil, don’t concern yourself.” “I’m sorry for this, Cecil,“ she’d apologize for the traffic or a story in the newspaper or someone else’s ill-judged comment, trying sweetly, frantically to keep the lid on, never getting angry herself. Aggressiveness in women was, after all, in poor taste. Every time I watched this, I wanted to scream.

* * *

“Mama, what are you angry about?” I asked when she’d had some morning coffee.

“Nothing,” she gasped, stricken I’d suggest such a thing. The room was already hot, and the smell of plaster dust burned my nose.

“You’re sure? Something long ago, maybe?”

“Oh, darlin’, I had the most marvelous childhood.” She relaxed back on the pillow smiling. “So many sweet people loved me, and my parents had a wonderful marriage. Never once raised their voices in anger.”

“Didn’t Grandma Vic ever complain that Granddad wouldn’t get a job?”

“Never. Not once. She always took up for him.”

I’d heard all this before and knew what was coming, but I listened more carefully this time.