The following is part two of the story of how I became an expert shoplifter. If you missed part one, it is here. In part three, I’ll get to the maguffin about the boosting, and then for those who want to know what happened next, part four.
I’m not sure of dates, but fairly sure it was after the first of the new year (1962) when Larry and I found our first apartment. It was a third-floor walkup in one of two identical big red brick buildings just southeast of the main downtown business district of Wichita. There was one small bedroom, which we decided would be Marie’s; we slept on a convertible sofa in the living room. I remembered riding past these apartment houses as a child and wanting to live there.
Everything just came together: Mama was being worn to a frazzle keeping up with Marie, and Grady was telling her she had to bring my daughter back to me. Marie and I wanted to be together. Granny was also burned out trying to keep up with a two-year-old. Larry was making better money than I was, taking temporary jobs through Manpower, Inc. I quit work and we set up housekeeping as a nuclear family. It was as close as I have ever been in my life to a “normal” lifestyle after the first seven years, before Daddy died.
It got off to an exhilarating start. The day we were separately packing our things and moving in, Larry had an abscessed tooth. He got an emergency appointment with a dentist. We talked on the phone and arranged to meet near the dental office after I had hauled a load of my clothes and housewares up to the apartment. Then we would walk back together and spend the first night in our own place.
On the walk home, Larry was feeling worse and worse. By the time we got up the stairs, he was short of breath and dizzy. He was clearly in distress, gasping for breath, unable to speak. I ran down the stairs and to the firehouse in the middle of the block, just past the other twin apartment building. I was in such a panic, I was trembling and having trouble talking, but I managed to tell a fireman what had happened to Larry, and that he had gotten a penicillin shot from the dentist.
Three firemen grabbed their gear and followed me back to the apartment. They gave Larry oxygen and a shot of ACTH. As he was coming around, one of them explained to me that he had gone into anaphylactic shock from penicillin allergy, and that by running for them I had saved his life. There was a little extra emotional something to our cuddling that night.
Mama brought Marie to Wichita soon after that. She also brought some housewares I had stored at the farm, and a few kitchen items that she didn’t need. One was an old Silex glass vacuum-style coffeemaker. Some of my most persistent memories of Larry involve coffee, and the brew we made in that pot was the best: just a pinch of salt in each batch. Marie (and I) watched in fascination as the steam pressure drove the water up into the funnel where the coffee brewed and, after the heat was turned off, the coffee filtered back into the pot. Simple pleasures for simple minds.
While Larry was at work, Marie and I walked to the library where we sat comfortably in some corner where my soft voice would not disturb anyone, and I read to her from old books I had loved and newer ones such as Curious George. When he was home, the two of them played. I recall the sound of her giggles during their games of peek-a-boo, and the seriousness with which she learned to count her toes and pull her socks on. She started calling him Daddy with no prompting from anyone, and none of us ever corrected her. Larry was Daddy.
His work became more irregular and our budget became very tight. We found an attic apartment in an old wood frame house a few blocks south of the first apartment, where the rent was less and there were two small bedrooms. Occasionally when they butchered a hog on the farm or visited the meat locker to pick up bacon or ham, Mama brought us treats. I cooked a lot of beans, rice and pasta. Concerned that Marie wasn’t getting enough protein, and also, I think, because it was important to Larry that he provide for us, he went hunting.
There were pigeons nesting in an unfinished portion of our attic which could be accessed through a panel in the kitchen. He found a broken baseball bat in the yard, crawled through the narrow, low-ceilinged space, and clubbed pigeons. On the bird ranch in California where I’d stayed with Mama and Grady before they moved to Burrton, I had learned how to pluck and dress quail, and these birds were not much different. They were tasty, and as the population diminished the noise of the birds was less troublesome to us, and to the neighbors downstairs who thanked Larry for getting rid of the pests.
Larry spoke frequently about Mesa Verde and Mancos, Colorado, where he had grown up. He had often visited a grandmother on the Ute Reservation there, he told me, and he had a small vocabulary of “Ute love words”, terms of affection and phrases like “nighty-night”, which he had learned from her and used with Marie and me. As spring approached, we decided to move to Mancos, where he expected to find work either in the match factory or in the woods, working for the Forest Service. We took his wages from a last stint distributing handbills, and caught a Trailways bus to Colorado.
Larry’s mother Dolly, her mother whose name I don’t recall (Marie and I called her Grandma, just like everyone else), and Larry’s younger brother Perry Dean Ensley welcomed us and treated us like family. We had to ourselves a room off one side of Grandma’s rambling, much-added-to, house. The heat source for the whole house was a coal-burning potbelly stove in the dining room. That room had a sofa and overstuffed chairs in addition to the dining set, and was the true living room of the house. The front parlor was closed off with a blanket hung over the door, and each of the bedrooms in their little lean-to additions had its own door that was kept shut to conserve heat. We used two of the three old iron beds in our room, and divided the pile of featherbeds from the third one between our bed and Marie’s.
With three featherbeds over us and I-don’t-know-how-many under us, the beds enveloped us. We nestled in them each morning until the sun was well up, watching the white vapor of our breath. Sometimes Marie would slip from her bed into ours for these mornings of laughter and conversation. Sunday mornings, Larry would go out and bring back the colored comics section from the newspaper, and we would read them together in bed as I had done with my parents when I had been small.
It was Spring, and there in the mountains nights were cold and days were brilliant and warm, filled with birdsong and the first blossoms. When we became certain that I was pregnant, we started planning for our baby. Marie was interested in the idea that I had a baby in my tummy and started calling it her own: saying, “my baby”, as she patted my belly. Larry and I began calling the baby Beedee, B.D., because we had decided to name a boy Robert (Bobby) Dean after my father’s brother and Larry’s. If a girl, she would be Barbara Deanne. Barbara, I had been told, was my half-sister’s name, my father’s daughter (along with two sons) from his first marriage.
Dolly seemed thrilled at becoming a grandmother. This would be her first grandchild, and it might have been Grandma’s first great-grandchild as well. Larry had submitted applications everywhere he thought he might find work in the area, but no one had called. We had a lot of time together. He did some chores and maintenance jobs around the house and I cooked a little and helped Perry with his math homework and spelling.
My mother, Little Granny, and I exchanged a lot of letters. Mama was living in Wichita with Granny now. My step-father had taken a truckload of his employer’s pigs to market and after selling them had taken the money and the truck and gone off on an alcohol binge. When the money ran out he burglarized several post offices in small Western Kansas towns for money order blanks, to extend the binge. I think at this time he was still on the loose, but before long he was arrested and ended up going to the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing.
There was no phone at Grandma’s house. There was a message phone somewhere (I forget where) and someone would come by and give us a message or a number to call back. We would walk several blocks down into the business area of Mancos to a public phone to return calls. When I got a message to call Mama, I knew it had to be big news, and I supposed that it had to do with Grady.
When I called her, she said that my husband had been there. The Army had given him compassionate leave because of marital problems. He had been waiting on the doorstep the previous day, when Granny returned home. He had found a letter in the mailbox that I had written to Mama, and saw my return address: General Delivery, Mancos, Colorado. He had spent the night there in Wichita and caught a bus that morning, saying he was coming to kill Larry.
I panicked. I packed hurriedly, tearfully said goodbye to Grandma and Dolly, and walked back downtown with Marie and my suitcase. Mama wired me money for bus fare through Western Union, and it was there by the time I got to the office. Marie and I boarded a bus to Durango, where my husband would have to stop to change buses a few hours after Marie and I arrived there. I intended to head him off before he could get to Larry.
I recall going to a movie in Durango to distract myself and pass the time while I waited for “Ford”. The movie was Summer and Smoke, and I left it before the end, in order to be sure I would not miss the bus on which he was riding.
I remember him in his Class A uniform and the fat he had put on in training. I don’t recall much of the bus ride back to Wichita, except some of the scenery as we went through a deep shaded canyon of looming gray rocks, and a dinner stop where Marie clung to me crying and would not eat, would not make eye contact with her father. He was furious, and I was careful not to be alone with him. Letting him go off anywhere alone with Marie was out of the question.
I was doing my best to placate and humor him. We caught the next bus eastbound from Durango, which left us with an overnight wait somewhere in the Rocky Mountains for a connecting bus to Wichita. We got a room in a shabby old hotel, and after Marie had gone to sleep we had six. Ford’s usual pattern was to be as degrading to me as possible, demanding oral sex and then forcing his penis down my throat, pushing my head down on him. During my pregnancy with Marie, a neighbor had shared some “marriage manuals” with me, and I had discussed foreplay and female orgasm with Ford. He didn’t believe in them. He preferred rape.
I endured the return trip to Kansas with Ford. He wasn’t there very long, planning to make a side-trip through Texas to visit his family on his way to Fort Dix, New Jersey where he’d get transport back to Germany. The night he was to catch his bus, we left Marie with Granny and he took me out to dinner. He gave it the full treatment, with phony and courtly manners and an expensive restaurant.
As physically forceful and coercive as he was about sex, in emotional matters he was ingratiating and manipulative. In the ambience of candlelight, crystal, and white linen, after the waiter had taken our orders, he handed me a gift-wrapped box. It contained Chanel #5, a box of bath powder, vial of perfume, and cologne spray. I clearly recall thinking how expensive such a gift must have been, just before he broke the spell by telling me he’d bought it in a duty free shop in Germany, for “next to nothing.”
As we ate — I had steak, salad, baked potato, tomato juice and tea, with ice cream for dessert — he tried to get my assurance that our marriage was going to continue. He plucked the old strings of pride and defiance with the us-against-the-world idea, saying that we couldn’t break up and prove that my mother and the teachers had been right about our marriage being destined to fail.
There, in the busy restaurant, with him so spit-shined and proper in his Class A Army greens, being excruciatingly polite, I wasn’t afraid to tell him how I felt. I said that it was over for me, that I wanted a divorce. As the time approached for his bus to depart, he paid the check, put me in a cab back to Granny’s house, and told me to think it over. He’d keep in touch. The cab pulled away from the curb and I didn’t look back. I was relieved to have gotten through the experience without either Marie or myself getting beaten up. I was thinking about getting back to Larry as soon as I could. I assume that a lack of money was what kept me from leaving immediately.
With Mama sharing Granny’s one-bedroom house, Marie and I needed a place to stay. I found a small, rundown converted garage in an alley back of 1422 South Broadway. Amazing what I remember, and what I don’t recall, isn’t it? Of course, I could have the number wrong. Who knows? I don’t remember when I moved in there, but it must have been late spring or early summer, very soon after I left Mancos. I was there on my eighteenth birthday, because I recall one day at the pay phone a few blocks away, outside a Kroger store, a distant cousin spotted me from the doorway of a bar across the street and invited me over for a beer. I called across to him that I couldn’t drink yet, but that in three weeks I’d be old enough. That had to be late August.
My last conversation with Larry might have been that day, but I think it was an earlier trip to that phone outside Kroger’s. I know that I had more than the one phone conversation with Larry after I went back to Wichita. I left many messages for him. Maybe about half a dozen times he returned my calls. I don’t know why I stayed there and didn’t immediately return to him after my husband returned to Germany. Larry might have told me we would get together later when he had his own place, or he might have just been avoiding committing himself and I mistakenly assumed we would get back together. I missed him horribly and ended up weeping every time I talked to him. To the best of my recollection, in the last conversation I had with Larry, he was putting me off and I was crying, saying I wanted to come back to him NOW. Finally, he said forget it, he would never take me back, and hung up.
I made numerous attempts to contact him after that. Sometimes my messages were ignored. On at least one occasion I spoke to his mother. She said he had gone to work on his Forest Service job and simply disappeared, didn’t come back. I believed her at the time and am less inclined to believe it now.
I was living on my Army allotment, which meant a marginal existence even with the paltry rent at that bug- and rat-infested hovel on the alley. One or two mornings a week I would take Marie to Granny’s house and leave her with Mama and/or Granny while I went door-to-door selling dresses made to order from a catalog of styles and book of fabric swatches. I should say, “trying to sell” because I didn’t ever sell one.
One of the things I recall from that summer was that there had been a child molester who had picked up several small kids in South Wichita. Whenever Marie was in the yard, I kept an eye on her. If she ever got out of sight of the open door, I’d walk to the door, open the screen and call her back into range. She’d answer, “I’m okay, Mommy,” and run back to where I could see her. One day I was reading on the couch and looked up from my book and noticed she was not there. Just as I started to rise to walk to the door, she ran up to the screen and yelled, “I’m okay, Mommy,” and went back to her trucks in the dirt.
The next time we went to the library, I looked up ESP and started reading books by J. B. Rhine. There wasn’t much else in print on the subject at the time, but I read all I could find.
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