March 13, 2006

• Texas Panhandle 1956

  I hadn’t been happy for years.  I had lived in a self-created hell
  since my father died suddenly, right after I had made an angry wish
  that he would die, five years previously.  So it either means a
  lot, or means nothing at all, to say that I was miserable when I was
  twelve years old and my mother and I left Wichita, Kansas and moved to
  Vernon, Texas.

  She had met a man through a lonely hearts club and after meeting him
  decided to move to Texas to be near him.  In Wichita, I left
  behind my steady boyfriend Bill, with whom I’d kept up a routine of
  nightly phone calls and Friday night movie dates ever since Mama and I
  had moved away from our old neighborhood and I’d entered a new school
  in southwest Wichita.  I also left behind an exciting secret “love
  affair” with a boy known as Frenchy.  We met each Saturday morning
  at a kids’ club movie in north Wichita, where we sat in the balcony and
  kissed and groped each other into a breathless frenzy.

  It has sometimes been suggested to me that as I went from boy to boy
  and then from man to man, I was seeking my absent father.  I heard
  that so often that I almost came to accept it.  The problem was
  that it wasn’t true.  Maybe through my father’s early death I was
  spared an agonizing Electra complex or even more problematic incestuous
  relationship — incest ran in his family — but as it was I had no
  sexual thoughts or feelings associated with my father.  What I was
  left with when he died was insecurity both emotional and economic, and
  guilt over my belief that I had caused his death.

  I found some psychological relief from my insecurity in those
  relationships with the boys I became attached to.  I had been
  enculturated with the fairy tale and soap opera version of romantic
  “love,” and thought that their adolescent hormonal interest in me was
  love.  It felt good to be “loved” and even better to be “in love,”
  to have the racing pulse, paralytic thrills and damp panties that came
  with kisses and caresses.

  The downside of  my preteen love life was more guilt because the
  adolescent fondling and feelings had to be kept from my mother. 
  She had taught me it was bad.  Likewise, I understood that my
  masturbation was bad and had to be kept hidden.  These matters
  were awfully confusing, because my mother was going through a series of
  romantic relationships in her attempt to replace my father, and movies
  and popular music were filled with both veiled and overt references to
  sexual “love”.

  Some of my classmates in school were as breathless and lovestruck as I
  was.  I had skipped a year in school, so my classmates were a year
  or two older than I, but I had budding breasts and wisps of pubic hair
  in fifth grade at age nine, and started menstruating when I was ten,
  before many of those older classmates.  I was far ahead of
  that curve where the opposite sex ceases to be alien and pestiferous
  and
  becomes fascinatingly attractive.

  The move to Texas changed everything.  Mama and I moved into a squalid little dwelling
  behind the modest home of an old lady I think was called Minnie. 
  I cried myself to sleep every night for I-don’t-know-how-many
  nights.  I whined and howled to my mother about how much I missed
  Bill, how I wanted to go back to Kansas and stay with Granny until we
  were old enough to get married.  She laughed at the idea the first
  few times, and then grew angry when I wouldn’t shut up about it as
  instructed.  I missed Frenchy, too, but since I had never told
  Mama anything about him I didn’t think it would be prudent to bring
  that up.

  We didn’t have a phone in that “garage apartment” and even if we had
  Mama wouldn’t have allowed me to call Bill long distance, so I wrote
  him long, intense letters.  He wrote back two or three times,
  briefly saying that he missed me, too, until finally I got a letter
  from him saying that his parents didn’t want us to correspond any
  longer.  My first Dear Jane letter.  I was devastated.

   Leaving behind the
  established relationships I had, I found myself unable to attract a new
  boyfriend.  In Vernon, there seemed to be two kinds of boys: 
  those who weren’t interested in girls and those who were going
  steady.  In that era and that culture, about all a “decent” girl
  could do was flirt a little.  She couldn’t even ask a boy to dance
  except when it was “ladies’ choice” or on Sadie Hawkins Day.  She
  couldn’t call boys on the phone, ask for a date, or “chase” at all, or
  she’d be branded a bad girl.  Mama was firm in her insistence that
  I be a good girl.

  Vernon was a small enough town to be exclusionary, and almost all the
  kids in jr. high were in one clique or another.  Girl friends were
  about as hard to get as boyfriends.  With no social life and only
  a very secretive solitary (though active verging on hyperactive) sex life, I had lots of time and attention to
  spare for schoolwork.  That was fortunate, because everything I’d
  learned about Kansas history was completely irrelevant here. 
  Suddenly, I was in the Confederacy and was thrown into a history class
  near mid-term, where they were studying the War Between the States.

  I knew a little bit about the Civil War, so I didn’t feel completely
  lost until I held up my hand in class to answer a question.  I was
  swiftly informed that in Texas it wasn’t the Civil War.  Realizing
  that I had a lot of catching up to do, I approached the teacher after
  class and asked for some make-up assignments. 

  I also asked if there was something I could do for extra credit. 
  In junior high in Wichita, “extra credit” projects were offered to any
  student who needed to bring up a bad grade or wanted to expand and
  enrich her experience in a favorite subject.  I’d had fun writing
  a play for a science unit on the solar system, and doing library
  research papers on archaeology for a history class and on Cubism for an
  art class I would otherwise have failed because of my inability to draw
  a recognizable figure.

  My history teacher answered my query with a blank look and I tried to
  explain what extra credit was.  She eventually understood, and
  suggested that I do ten pages on the Battle of San Jacinto.  My
  research led me to the Alamo, of course, and for a while then I was so
  involved in Texas history that I didn’t have time to notice the lack of
  friends or familiar faces.

  When I had enrolled, I’d had my doctor’s excuse from physical
  education
  in hand.  Being freed from that required course, I was offered an
  extra elective.  For the remainder of eighth grade, in addition to
  the required algebra, English, history and music, I had a business
  course taught by my English teacher Mrs. Pace, home economics
  (cooking), and a study hall that I didn’t need.  I soon got out of
  the study hall so I could spend that hour shelving, dusting and
  cataloguing books in the library.  When the chorus director
  discovered that I couldn’t carry a tune in a tub, she got me out of
  that class and I took a semester of elective ninth grade science.

  Mama got a job as cook’s helper in the school cafeteria.  Money
  was very tight, so she got me a job washing dishes after lunch in
  exchange for my lunches.  That helped cover for my lack of social
  connections.  While the other kids were gulping their food in the
  cafeteria and running to meet friends outside who had brown-bagged it,
  or the ones down the street at Cooper’s store who lunched on burgers, I
  was gulping down my lunch so I could get to the dish room, scrape
  plates, load rack after rack through the dishwasher and get done before
  the bell rang for afternoon classes.

  I even got the occasional bit of paid “overtime” there when the
  cafeteria was used for evening events.  One very
  memorable occasion was when the sports booster club held a fund-raising
  chili feed.  It was my first taste of Texas chili.  I’d
  always thought that chili was made with beans and smelled and tasted
  like tomato sauce.  The steam table was loaded with
  spicy-smelling, tangy real chili, all beef and no beans.  It
  didn’t look like chili to me, but they offered me a free bowl and I
  tried it.  When the chili supper was over, Mama and I filled a
  clean #10 can with about a gallon of leftover chili and took it home,
  where it didn’t last more than a day or two.  This was my
  introduction to a lifelong love affair with Tex-Mex food, which even
  now remains my favorite cuisine, my specialty.  I can smell that
  chili now, and it’s making me salivate.

  

  • 11:00 pm
  • 7 Comments