Reviving Ophelia (37 page)

I knew the names of all the people and most of the cats and dogs. Everyone “doctored” with my mother and bought corn from my father. All the children played at the same places—the swimming pool, the school yard, the swing across Beaver Creek and the fairgrounds. Everyone knew who was related to whom. When people met, the first thing they did was establish a connection. People on the street said hello to someone with whom they had a rich and complicated lifelong relationship. My pottery teacher, Mrs. Van Cleave, was the grandmother of my good friend Patti and the mother of our next-door neighbor. She was my mom’s patient, and her husband went fishing with my dad. Her son was the football coach and his children were in my Methodist youth group.

I had eleven aunts and uncles and thirty cousins who showed up for long visits. The women cooked and watched babies, the men played horseshoes and fished. We all played cards in the evening. My grandfather recited limericks and demonstrated card tricks. Conversation was the main entertainment. We cousins would compare stories about our towns and families. The older cousins would impress the younger ones with their worldly wisdom. Children sat and listened as grown-ups told stories and talked politics. My fondest memory is of falling asleep to laughter and talk in the next room.

The word “media” was not in our language. I saw television for the first time when I was six, and I hid behind the couch because the cowboys’ guns scared me. I was eight before we had a black-and-white television on which we watched one grainy station that showed a test pattern much of the day.

As a young teenager I watched “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “American Bandstand” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I wasn’t allowed to watch “Perry Mason” or “Gunsmoke” because my, parents thought these shows were too violent. We had one movie theater with a new movie every other week. The owner of the theater was a family man who selected our town’s movies carefully. His wife sold us salty popcorn, Tootsie Rolls and Cokes. Kids went to the movies on Saturday afternoons and spent most of their time spying on other kids or giggling with their friends.

I loved
Tammy, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Chartroose Caboose and South Pacific.
I scanned these movies for information about sex. Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Frank Sinatra fought and flirted until the end of the movie, when they kissed against backdrops of sunsets to the sounds of swelling violins. This was the era of biblical epics. In
The Story of Ruth,
a demure young Ruth lies down on Boaz’ pallet for the night and the camera zooms to the stars. I asked myself, What were they doing on that pallet?

Forty-five RPM records were big in the late fifties. I listened to mushy songs by the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Elvis. My favorite song was Elvis’ “Surrender,” a song whose lyrics gave me goose bumps and filled me with longing for something I couldn’t name. My parents forbade me to listen to Bobby Darin’s hit “Multiplication” because it was too suggestive. I learned to twist, a dance that was considered daring.

As Garrison Keillor said, “Nobody gets rich in a small town because everybody’s watching.” Money and conspicuous consumption were downplayed in my community. Some people were wealthier than others, but it was bad taste to flaunt a high income. We all shopped at the Theobald’s grocery and the Rexall and ordered our clothes from Sears and JCPenney catalogs. The banker ordered a new Oldsmobile every year, and my family drove to Mexico at Christmas. A rancher’s widow with asthma had the only home air-conditioning unit. The only places to spend money foolishly were the Dairy King and the pool hall.

Particularly children were outside the money economy. Most of our pleasures were free. Most of us had the same toys—Schwinn bikes, Hula-Hoops, basketballs, Monopoly games and dolls or toy soldiers. We could buy Sugar Babies or licorice at the pool, and makeup, comics and
Mad
magazines at the drugstore.

After school I worked for my mother at her clinic. I sterilized syringes and rubber gloves and counted pills. The money I earned went into a college account. By junior high, gifts went into my hope chest—good china, luggage, a dictionary and tatted pillowcases.

Elsewhere mass marketing had begun. Women were encouraged to fix up their homes and dress themselves and their children smartly. Via commercials and advertisements, they were fed a distorted image of themselves and their place in society. This image was less focused on their sexuality and more on their femininity. But because of our distance from a city, mass marketing barely touched our town.

Our town was a dry town and our state had “blue laws,” which kept liquor from being advertised, sold on Sundays or served in restaurants. Even our pool hall served nothing stronger than root beer. My father brought tequila back from Mexico and would open a bottle and share it with other men on a Saturday night. Teenage boys had a difficult time finding alcohol. Once my cousin Roy drove fifty miles, convinced a stranger to buy him a six-pack, returned home and hid the six-pack in a culvert.

The Surgeon General had yet to issue his report on smoking, and cigarettes were everywhere, but marijuana and other drugs were unheard of in my town. My father told me that during World War Two a soldier had offered him a marijuana cigarette. He said, “I turned him down and it’s a good thing. If I’d said yes, I probably wouldn’t be alive today.”

At Methodist Youth Fellowship we saw films about the deterioration of people who drank or used marijuana. Women in particular were portrayed as degraded and destroyed by contact with chemicals. After these films we signed pledges that we would never drink or smoke. I didn’t break mine until I was in college.

As Tolstoy knew so well, in all times and places there have been happy and unhappy families. In the fifties, the unhappiness was mostly private. Divorce was uncommon and regarded as shameful. I had no friends whose parents were divorced. All kinds of pain were kept secret. Physical and sexual abuse occurred but were not reported. Children and women who lived in abusive families suffered silently. For those whose lives were going badly, there was nowhere to turn. My friend Sue’s father hanged himself in his basement. She missed a week of school, and when she returned we treated her as if nothing had happened. The first time Sue and I spoke of her father’s death was at our twenty-fifth-year class reunion.

There was cruelty. The town drunk was shamed rather than helped. Retarded and handicapped people were teased. The Green River Ordinance, which kept undesirables—meaning strangers—out of town, was enforced.

I was a sheltered child in a sheltered community. Most of the mothers were homemakers who served brownies and milk to their children after school. Many of them may have been miserable and unfulfilled with their lives of service to men, children and community. But, as a child, I didn’t notice.

Most of the fathers owned stores downtown and walked home for lunch. Baby-sitters were a rarity. Everyone went to the same chili feeds and county fairs. Adults were around to keep an eye on things. Once I picked some lilacs from an old lady’s bush. She called my parents before I could make it home with my bouquet.

Teenagers fought less with their parents, mostly because there was less to fight about—designer clothes and R-rated movies didn’t exist. There was consensus about proper behavior. Grown-ups agreed about rules and enforced them. Teenagers weren’t exposed to an alternative value system and they rebelled in milder ways—with ducktails, tight skirts and rock and roll. Adults joked about how much trouble teenagers were, but most parents felt proud of their children. They didn’t have the strained faces and the anxious conversations that parents of teenagers have in the 1990s.

Men had most of the public power. The governor, the state senators, the congressmen, the mayor and city council members were men, and men ran the stores downtown. My mother was the first “lady doctor” in our town and she suffered some because of this. She wasn’t considered quite as feminine and ladylike as the other women, and she wasn’t considered quite as good a doctor as the male doctor in the next town.

In the fifties women were forced to surrender the independence they’d won during World War Two and return home so as not to threaten men. Women’s work was separate and unequal. Many women had no access to money or transportation. Their husbands controlled the bank accounts and cars. Women’s contributions, such as sewing, tending the sick and cooking church dinners, were undervalued. At its centennial, our town published its history of the last hundred years. In the seventy-five-page book, women are not mentioned.

Language was unself-consciously noninclusive—leaders were “he,” hurricanes and secretaries “she,” humanity was mankind. Men made history, wrote books, won wars, conducted symphonies and created eternal works of art. The books we read in school were written by men and about men. They were shared with us by women teachers who didn’t comment on their own exclusion.

Schools and churches enforced male power. Men were principals, superintendents and ministers; women were teachers. We studied the Bible story of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God’s orders. When my female cousins married, they vowed obedience to their husbands.

Kent, Sam and I were the top students. The teachers praised them for being brilliant and creative, while I was praised for being a hard worker. Kent and Sam were encouraged to go to out-of-state schools to study law or medicine, while I was encouraged to study at the state university to be a teacher.

There was a pervasive, low-key misogyny. Mothers-in-law, women drivers and ugly women were sources of derisive humor. Men needed to “wear the pants in the family.” Uppity women were quickly chastened and so were their husbands for allowing themselves to be “hen-pecked” or “led around by the apron strings.” Women’s talk was regarded as inferior to the important talk of men.

Femininity training was strong. We were taught that if we couldn’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything. (I remember being delighted when Alice Roosevelt Longworth was quoted as saying, “If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.”) We were admonished that “it’s not smart to be smart,” and that we should “let boys chase us till we catch them.”

By junior high the all-girl activities were different from the all-boy activities. Boys played sports while we walked around the gym with books on our heads so that we would have good posture. Boy Scouts camped and fished while Girl Scouts sold cookies and learned to sew, bake and care for children.

I read the Cherry Ames student nurse books. In every book Cherry would meet a new young doctor and have an innocent romance in a glorious setting. Thank goodness I also read Nancy Drew and the Dana sisters’ mysteries. Those amateur sleuths were competent and confident, brave and adventurous. They gave me role models that were lively and active. They had boyfriends, but they were always ditching them to go solve a robbery.

The prettiest girls were the most popular. I read
Teen
magazine with its fashion and beauty tips, and I rolled up my hair at night and combed it out in the morning. I still can feel the pressure of those big spiky rollers on my scalp. I did bust-building and tummy-flattening exercises.

Boys preferred dating girls whom they could best in every way. Achievement in girls was valued as long as it didn’t interfere with social attractiveness. Too much education or ambition was considered unfeminine. When I received the Bausch & Lomb science award at a school assembly, I almost expired of embarrassment.

Sexuality was seen as a powerful force regulated by God Himself. There were rules and euphemisms for everything. “Don’t touch your privates except to wash.” “Don’t kiss a boy on your first date.” “Never let a guy go all the way or he won’t respect you in the morning.”

Sex was probably my most confusing problem. I read Pat Boone’s
Twixt Twelve and Twenty,
which didn’t clarify anything. I wasn’t sure how many orifices women had. I knew that something girls did with boys led to babies, but I was unable to picture just what that was. I misunderstood dirty jokes and had no idea that songs were filled with sexual innuendo. Well into junior high, I thought that the word “adultery” meant trying to act like an adult.

One of my girlfriends had an older cousin who hid romance magazines under her bed. One day when she was away at a twirling competition, we sneaked up to her room to read them. Beautiful young women were overwhelmed by lust and overpowered by handsome heroes. The details were vague. The couple fell into bed and the woman’s blouse was unbuttoned. Her heart would flutter and she would turn pale. The author described a storm outside or petals falling from flowers in a nearby vase. We left the house still uneducated about what really happened. Years later, when I finally heard what the sex act entailed, I was alarmed.

I was easily embarrassed. Tony, the town hoodlum, was my particular curse. Tony wore tight jeans and a black leather jacket and oozed sexual evil. In study hall he sketched a naked woman, scribbled my name on her and passed her around the room. Another time he told me to hold out my hand, and when I did, he dropped a screw into it and shouted, “You owe me a screw.”

There was a scary side of sexuality. One friend’s dad told her, “Don’t get pregnant, but if you do, come to me and I’ll load up my gun.” A second cousin had to marry because she was pregnant. She whispered to me that her boyfriend had blackmailed her into having sex. She was a homecoming queen candidate and he said he’d go to homecoming with her only if she gave in. He claimed that he was suffering from “blue balls,” a painful and unhealthy condition that only sex would remedy.

Lois and Carol taught me my most important lessons. Lois was a pudgy, self-effacing fourteen-year-old whose greatest accomplishment was eight years of perfect attendance at our Sunday school. One Sunday morning she wasn’t there, and when I remarked on that fact, the teacher changed the subject. For a time no one would tell me what had happened to Lois. Eventually, however, I was so anxious that Mother told me the story. Lois was pregnant from having sex with a middle-aged man who worked at her father’s grocery store. They had married and were living in a trailer south of town. She was expelled from school and would not be coming to church anymore, at least not until after the baby was born. I never saw her again.