December 24, 2003

• Panhandle Christmas

  Maybe it is a combination of the holiday season and Mercury
  retrograde.  For whatever reason, I’m adding to the memoirs for
  the first time in many months.  This episode follows where I left
  off my childhood in Halstead, Kansas, with a gap of a couple of years that I shall sketch in here.

  Mama had given up trying to make a living out of her own business,
  the sundries store.  She sold it and we moved to Wichita, 
  sharing the house with her sister Alice, whom everyone called “Granny”
  except for her brothers and sisters.  They had called her “Mom”
  since they were all children because she, the eldest, reared them
  after my  grandmother died bearing the last of those eleven kids,
  only five of whom survived to adulthood.  Granny’s house would be
  my home base for years to come, even after I was married.  It
  wasn’t a big house, had only one bedroom, but Granny always had room
  for us when we needed it.

  Mama first had a waitress job briefly, and then she went to work in
  the city school cafeterias for the year I was in seventh grade. 
  That summer when school was out, we packed everything we owned into our
  dark blue ’48 Chevy coupe and spent the school vacation in southern
  California with my aunts and uncles out there.  Clothing and some
  cooking gear for use in motel kitchenettes along the way went into the
  rear trunk.   The TV went on the back seat and household
  goods in boxes were packed around it to make a platform even with the
  top of the seat back.  It was padded with all our bedding and I
  spent most of the travel time up there, either sleeping or playing or
  reading.  That was to become our summer migratory pattern for
  several years, but that’s another story.

  When we returned from California before the start of school in 1956,
  the year I was in eighth grade, instead of waiting for school to open
  and going to work in a cafeteria, Mama followed a job lead Granny gave
  her and took a housekeeper/companion gig for an old friend of Granny’s,
  a widow, Mrs. Bull, who had once along with her late husband run a
  chain of half a dozen or so movie theaters in Wichita, during the
  Golden Age of films.  Mrs. Bull was limping around on a cane
  following a hip-pinning surgery, and her children had decided she
  needed someone to take care of her and the big old brick house on the
  edge of town.

  She decided that as much as she needed a cook and housekeeper, she
  also needed to get out and about.  One day she hobbled out to the
  little dilapidated one-car garage beside the house and unveiled the
  dove gray Cadillac sedan Mr. Bull had bought shortly before he
  died.  Mama became chauffeur, too, and in its plush interior we
  would take long Sunday drives to nowhere, across the endless flat
  prairie.  One of the perks of that job, for me, was an endless
  supply of free movie passes, but that’s another story (Did I tell it
  already?  I think it’s written down but maybe not yet posted here.)

  Mama had been joining “lonely hearts clubs” since she had realized
  that my stepfather Jim wasn’t going to show up. ( Those “clubs”, for
  those not up on 1950s pop culture, were a singles’ ads hustle in which
  members paid for a  monthly mailing of other members’ ads. 
  This “private” form of mate solicitation preceded the open publication
  of such ads in newspapers and magazines.)  She wrote to a few men
  who lived at a distance whose self-promoting ad copy interested her,
  but most of the responses she got to the ad she placed were
  from men in the Wichita area looking for a nearby woman to make an
  up-close and personal connection.

  There weren’t a lot of them.  She was fairly honest in her ad
  copy about wanting a husband, a father for me, and though not exactly
  recent the picture she included wasn’t exactly attractive,
  either.  Occasionally one of them would show up and she’d go out
  on a date.  Few came back for a second date.  One, Charlie
  McDonald, a World War II vet with “combat fatigue”, which is what
  they used to call post-traumatic stress disorder,  even married
  her, I think.  Anyhow, they went off for a weekend in Kansas City,
  MO (Kansas had a marriage “waiting period” and many elopements were to
  Missouri) and when they came back he moved into Granny’s house with us
  and she started using his last name.  However, I don’t recall any
  formalities of divorce or anything before she “married” the next
  one. 

  They were very lovey-dovey together for a while, until he started
  (resumed, I assume) drinking.  Then there were a series of nasty
  late-night scenes when he’d come in and shout and shake us awake and
  we’d have to sit there and listen to his gory war stories until he
  passed out.  Then we’d get his shoes off and pour him into
  bed.  After a few months, Mama talked him into moving out. 
  They remained friends and dated occasionally, and if memory serves, it
  was he who introduced her to another of my stepfathers, Carl Cooper, the one for whom I ironed the pocketfuls of crumpled, booze-soaked poker winnings the day I first met him.

  Mostly, the men who responded to her ad were good for a day out at
  the zoo or Lake Afton, dinner at a cafe, and usually a few laughs later
  at their bad toupees or the way they were suddenly a lot shorter or
  older or poorer in person than they had indicated in their ads. 
  One of the ones who responded to her ad seemed very different. 
  His name was Bill.  I don’t think I ever read any of his letters
  to her, but I remember seeing them, the large childish handwriting and
  purple ink.  She spoke of how “romantic” he was.  They wrote
  back and forth frequently and she talked about him a lot, as I
  recall.  He was often the topic of conversation over breakfast or
  dinner.   He wrote to her from Texas and they corresponded
  for months before they eventually started a series of long distance
  phone conversations (something that to people in our economic state was
  very rare back then) that led to our driving to Vernon, Texas for
  Christmas of ’56.

  Bill lived with his old maid sister Bea, in a three-room apartment,
  the second-floor rear of a four-unit building on a street shaded with
  large old cottonwood trees.  Mama was in her mid-forties then,
  Bill a year or two younger and Bea had been a teenager when Bill was
  born, so she would have to have been born in the late nineteenth
  century.  Vernon is near where the Panhandle joins the rest of
  Texas, fifty miles from Wichita Falls and a hundred and something from
  Amarillo.  It was cattle country before oil was discovered there,
  and cattle still grazed among the rocking and chugging pumps in the oil
  fields.  Wanderlust was one of the major drives in my young life,
  and just being out on the road and seeing new places was a thrill for
  me.  Getting to Vernon and meeting Mama’s “romantic” new boyfriend
  and his loony sister was a letdown.

  Every surface in their apartment–end tables, the back of the
  kitchen table, top of the oven of the old gas range, even the top of
  the toilet tank–was littered with whatnots, most of them salt or
  pepper shakers, many of them single members of broken sets, with a
  sprinkling of glass animals.  We learned later that Bea was a
  kleptomaniac and almost her entire collection was stolen either from
  friends, neighbors or stores.  When someone would tell Bill that
  Bea had lifted one of their salt shakers, he’d pay them off.  I
  don’t think Bea ever got busted and booked for her thievery.

  The apartment was decorated for the holiday.  There was a
  Christmas tree with ordinary glass ball ornaments and some handmade
  additions such as strung popcorn and cranberries, and a construction
  paper chain like we had made in elementary school.  Bea was quite
  proud of her handiwork.  Draped around the tree was a long
  streamer of a red substance that looked like cellophane.  On the
  walls were other streamers of the same stuff, some a dark red and some
  more orangey red, spelling out “Merry Christmas”.  I complimented
  her on the “cellophane” and she corrected me.  It was “cow guts”,
  dried and some of it dyed, sausage casing.  She said that she and
  “Hice” used to work in the local packing house and they’d gotten a
  bunch of sausage casings there.  I didn’t know then who Hice was,
  but learned later that it was Bill’s middle name, his mother’s maiden
  name, I think.  Bea called him that all the time.

  The experience, for me, was surreal.  Both of them were
  strange, weird people.  I sensed it then and from my current
  perspective can see how it occurred and can even give names to the
  pathologies.  Bea and I disliked each other on sight, I
  suppose.  At least I know that was my reaction to her and can only
  assume from her subsequent behavior that it was so for her.  Mama
  and Bill were something else.  They held hands and passed mooning
  looks back and forth.  For them that exploratory meeting was a
  huge success.  After the holiday, Mama and I drove back to Wichita
  and she gave Mrs. Bull short notice that she would be leaving, waiting
  only long enough for the old woman to find a replacement for her.

  Bill, who no longer worked in the packing plant, was at that time
  pumping gas in a gas station/garage on Wilbarger Street, the highway
  that runs east/west through the middle of town.  He introduced
  Mama to the owners of the cafe where he always ate lunch, and she was
  hired as waitress even before she had packed up to move down there from
  Wichita.

  Cheap housing in Vernon was readily available but invariably
  squalid.  I know this because over the next few years first my
  mother and I and then my first husband and I lived in a lot of
  it.  That first place my mother and I found to live in was called
  in the classified ad a “garage apartment” but I doubt that any
  motorized vehicle had ever been parked in it.  It probably
  originated as a carriage house.  It had been used as a chicken
  house before the old landlady turned it into an income source. 
  There were still traces of chicken shit in some corners of the dirt
  floor of the “pantry” off the kitchen when we moved in.  The shack
  was uninsulated and there were many gaps in the tarpaper that covered
  the walls, gaps that let in daylight and wind.  That winter I
  learned the meaning of the phrase, “blue norther”.

  ---

  Something this morning reminded me of that bleak Christmas, one of a
  series of bleak Christmases that started with my father’s death in
  1951.  Shortly after noon today, as he was headed off to bed (his
  26-hour day having brought him back to being up for at least some of
  the daylight hours) Doug said with a rueful chuckle, “The sooner I get
  to bed, the sooner it will be Christmas morning.”  The chuckle was
  rueful because he believes there will be no presents this year. 
  Until that gun show Greyfox worked last weekend there was no spare
  cash, and no one in the family has been physically up to a shopping
  excursion, even with the credit cards.

  I picked up on the joke and said if he’d hang up a stocking, I’d
  fill it with oranges and apples.  That’s a joke because the
  oranges and apples are now sitting around in a bowl and basket on the
  coffee table.  He hasn’t hung a stocking in years, not since his
  preference for stocking stuffers evolved from matchbox cars into those
  PS2 DVD cases that are so hard to stuff into a stocking.  He
  doesn’t know it, but he will actually be getting a present tomorrow
  morning.  Final Fantasy X-2 arrived weeks ago and I hid it. 
  He knows it is here but thinks he’s going to have to get all the dirty
  dishes done and the kitchen clean before he gets to play it.  But
  I want to play it now, and so….

  He will find it wrapped on the coffee table beside Couch Potato
  Heaven when he wakes tonight.  When I’m sure he’s sound asleep,
  I’ll go back and dig out the wrapping paper, and when the wrapping
  chore is done I’m going to bake for him a batch of chocolate chip pecan
  brownies.  I’m pretty sure there will be no gifts for me this
  Christmas, but that’s okay, really.  The pleasure is in the
  giving, after all.  I wish I could think up something to give Greyfox.

  • 7:32 pm
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