June 29, 2002

• Finding and Losing the Love of my Life

  Backstory: When I was fourteen, I got married. The reason was sex: it was the 1950s in the Bible Belt, North Texas, and in that culture sex outside of marriage wasn’t acceptable. I had been a randy red-headed adolescent looking for someone to relieve me of my virginity since about age nine. When I was 13, I found a sixteen year old boy willing to do it in the back seat of a Chevy. When my mother noticed that my boyfriend and I were “getting serious”, she decided she needed to break us up. When she threatened to send me away to a boarding school, I pretended to be pregnant and manipulated her into signing consent for underage marriage.

  My young husband had been an abused child. We’d only been married a few months when he bloodied my nose and blacked both eyes, with one blow, for making a sarcastic remark to him. From there, it got worse. After I had a baby, he abused her, too. While I was pregnant, he found another woman and told me to get out.  When our daughter was about eleven months old, he threw me out again.  I let him sweet-talk me into taking him back each time. The second time, he followed me to California, then when my stepfather ran him off he went to live with an aunt of his in Stockton, while he looked for work.

  He found a job, rented an apartment, and sent for us.  Then he got fired soon after my daughter and I moved into the little basement apartment. He took his final paycheck and got drunk on the way home. First he sat down on the couch and dragged the baby’s toy box over to him. With her watching, one by one, he took her toys from the box and cut them up with his pocket knife: dolls, rubber squeaky toys: anything he could destroy, he did.  Of course, she cried.

  I talked to her soothingly, because I knew that if she cried he would start hurting her, “giving her something to cry about.” It was useless, because he wanted her to cry. He taunted her and roughed her up, pinching, poking, and shaking her.

  When the toys were all out of the box and their pieces scattered on the floor, he started hitting her and I started begging him to stop, crying, pulling on his arm to divert his sadistic acts from her to me. He beat on me until both Marie and I were worn out, sobbing and cowering, then he went to sleep.

  I picked up my daughter and ran from our apartment to the upstairs neighbors to call the police. Two cops came to the house, talked to me upstairs, observed the bruises and cut, swollen lips on both of us, then went downstairs, saw the destruction, and talked to my husband. After that they talked to me again and advised me that I could sign a complaint and they would take him to jail, but he would probably be out in a few hours at most, and would be angry. They asked if I had anywhere to go.

  I knew no one in that city except his family, and I had no money for bus fare to anywhere else, and I told them that. They talked to him again, and as a result of their talk, whatever they said, he decided to join the army. He told me it would give him a way to support Marie and me without our having to live with him. It sounded good to me.

  I called an uncle in nearby Sacramento. He came and took Marie and me to stay with his family for a while. There I soon found a live-in housekeeping job, where I was “babysitter” for a boy two years younger than I.  I had lied and said I was eighteen, not sixteen as I actually was.

  After a few months, all contrite and apologetic, my husband persuaded me to join him again and we went through the same pattern of abuse followed by contrition and promises and then more abuse until he was ordered to Germany.  Back in Kansas with my family, I was determined that once I got someplace where I could find a way to support myself, I wasn’t going back to him again.

  The story below starts in October of 1961, when I was barely 17 and Marie had just turned two. We were staying with my mother and her fourth husband on a hog farm outside Burrton, Kansas.  My husband had just gone to Germany in the Army.

  ---

  There weren’t many job opportunities around Burrton, but I took the one that came up. I was the sole person on the graveyard shift (midnight to 8 AM) at a combination gas station, general store and cafe, beside the highway. Too much responsibility for one with virtually no work experience, and only fifty cents an hour, that job lasted just a few weeks before I was nuts from the stress of trying to jump gas pumps, catch shoplifters, and cook burgers at the same time. My mother suggested I should stay with my Aunt Alice (whom everyone called Granny) in Wichita, where I could find a better job. Marie would stay on the farm with Mama and Grady for a week or so, then Mama would bring her to town and we would decide whether Granny could keep her while I hunted a job, or while I worked, if I had found a job by then.

  I put in applications all over town and was hired first by a drive-in restaurant near Wichita State University, for the swing shift: 5 PM to 1 AM. It was a long bus ride from Granny’s house, requiring two transfers. Buses stopped running before I got off work at night and I had to get a cab home. That didn’t leave much of my income to pay for our expenses. I had been there only a short time, when one of the other applications I’d filled out brought a call to an interview.

  When Dockum’s Drugs called, I jumped at the chance to work there. It was a much shorter bus ride, no transfers. Instead of car-hopping at night in the Kansas winter, I would be working a day shift indoors at a soda fountain where I could use the skills I had learned in Halstead when Mama owned the drugstore. The pay rate was higher, too, and tips turned out to be better. I loved it.

  The lunch counter was L-shaped, extending the full length of the store along the west wall and halfway across the south wall, to where a back door opened onto the elevator lobby for the office building of which Dockum’s occupied the ground floor. At the end of the L was a hinged countertop, open underneath, which could be raised to allow someone to pass through carrying supplies from the store room off the elevator lobby, or could be ducked under for a quick trip to the rest room. My work station was at that end of the counter.

  Most of my customers were the doctors and lawyers from the offices above, their nurses and clerical staffs. At break times, they would sit on the stools and drink coffee or ice cream sodas. At lunchtime, they often called down sandwich orders and picked them up at the pass-through counter. Skilled perfectionist that I was, I quickly gained a reputation among the secretaries for my ice cream sodas, sundaes and shakes. When we were busy at lunchtime, the manager and other counter girls would “let” me fill their soda fountain orders, too, since I was fast and neat and never got complaints. One of the other counter girls was Bobbi. She was frequently in tears at first because she got a lot of complaints about lumpy shakes or weak, thin sodas, etc. I earned her gratitude and friendship by helping out when she was rushed, and showing her how to do it right.

  Marie was staying part of the time with Granny while I worked, and with Mama on the farm whenever Granny went on one of her frequent trips to visit her children or grandkids. Marie missed me, and I missed her horribly. She was speaking in full sentences. One of those sentences had been repeated to everyone who would listen, by both Mama and me, who had heard her say it, in answer to an “I love you” from one of us: “ReeRee love ev’ybody.”  She was a delight, and we were both extremely happy to be free of her abusive father and among people who loved us.

  I had a class Q army allotment of $91.30 a month. With my wages and tips, and paying only minimal expenses at Granny’s, I could afford some correspondence courses toward finishing high school. I took psychology, advanced algebra and drafting. I stayed busy whether Marie was in town with me or on the farm with Mama, and I felt I was getting somewhere, had a future to look forward to for the first time since my marriage had gone sour about six months into it, when my husband moved his girlfriend into our house while I was helping my mother recover from her first heart attack.

  It was late in the winter, when I noticed a young man standing at the pass-through counter, and turned to wait on him. He wanted change for a quarter for the phone. I recognized him as Larry Ensley, who had been brought to my eleventh birthday party by his cousin, my neighbor and boyfriend Dennis Turner. I had fallen in love with Larry at first sight, kissed him and got kissed back, very passionately. That day at the party, I dumped Dennis, only to have Larry walk out of my life a few days later when he went back home from the visit to his cousins. He had been about thirteen, give or take a year, at the time.

  I said, “Aren‘t you Larry Ensley?” He said it was what he had once been called, but his name was really Turner. He recognized me and we quickly made a date to meet for coffee when I got off work. I distractedly worked the rest of my shift, wondering if he would really come back, or if he would vanish from my life yet again.

  He was there waiting when Dockum’s closed. We walked a few blocks to the cafe at the bus station, one of few places open in the area at that hour. We drank coffee and listened to arrivals and departures being called over the PA system. We must have talked, but I don’t remember much of what I said to him. I can only guess that I filled him in on what had been going on since I’d seen him last.

  He told me that he had worked as a gunslinger during the summer in the Wild West reenactments at Cow Town theme park, and had learned to do quick-draw well enough to win some competitions. He was a skilled stuntman, and got the plum job of “bad guy” which involved being “shot” off a running horse.

  He explained about the names, that Ensley was his step-father’s name and his younger brother’s and that he had always thought it was his name, too, until he had to register for the draft and saw on his birth certificate that his name was Turner, his mother’s maiden name. Until then, he had not known that he was illegitimate. He seemed a little uneasy about telling me that, but I couldn’t have cared less. There was a table between us and I was a married woman, or else I would have been in his lap, all over him. I never, before or since, had any man affect me that powerfully.

  He saw me to the last bus leaving downtown in my direction that night, and I don’t think we touched each other at all, in that meeting. But after that he was there every evening when I got off work, and there were several of those walks to the bus depot and coffee and conversation across the black Formica tables.  At some point our arms brushed together on the walk, and he took my hand. Then we were holding hands across the table, gazing into each other’s eyes, talking not about past and present, but about plans for the future.

  On my days off (Larry was between jobs and got a few temporary gigs distributing handbills and such, during this time) we would go to a movie or to the zoo in Riverside Park together, and when Marie was in town with me, we took her wherever we went. She liked Larry immediately, and he liked her. When she got tired of walking, it was Larry she turned to with a “pick me up” gesture. On one trip to a movie, she was begging to be carried all the time, until I figured out that I’d put her shoes on the wrong feet, and all three of us had a good laugh about that.

  There was strong chemistry and sexual tension between us all along, but we never discussed going to a cheap hotel (cheap would have been the only option) or finding a dark corner somewhere. One day Granny was gone on a visit and I had her house to myself while Mama had Marie in the country. Larry came over for a visit on my day off. We listened to the radio and then we danced. We had Granny’s big bed and our day together just flowed naturally into the best sex (the first really good sex) I had ever had. I was ecstatic during and euphoric for days after. It took our relationship onto a new level and we decided we would have to find a place and move in together.

  This story continues in part 2.
  

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