July 2, 2007

• Emancipated Minors

  After we were married, Ford and I learned that by marrying we had become emancipated minors.  In Texas, we were told, emancipated minors had the rights and responsibilities of adults.

  Ford carried our marriage certificate around in his pocket all the time, to show people that he was legally an adult.  He said that it didn’t seem to help in finding a job.  There were not many jobs available, and he had no work experience, so being a sixteen year old “adult” didn’t make much difference.  He did a little bit of day labor, and once in a while his stepfather or an uncle would pay him for helping out with some work.  We got by.

  If we’d had to pay for heat and electricity, I don’t think we could have.  That winter, the bills went to whichever member of the family it was who had the utilities turned on for us.  I don’t think we questioned it.  We were kids, accustomed to having our needs met. 

  One day a week, on Sunday, we could count on a huge meal at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, always fried chicken.   Grandma raised chickens, and so did some of the aunts and uncles.  They gave us eggs.  Grandma would send us home after Sunday dinner with leftovers and jars of home canned tomatoes and peaches.

  I was learning to cook a cuisine that was totally new to me.  Mama and I had seldom eaten beans, and when we did it was in a dish like navy beans and ham or baked beans with molasses.  Ford’s family ate beans almost every weekday, boiled beans, seasoned not with ham or bacon, but sometimes with salt pork but usually with bologna.  It was cheap, so I tried to adjust to that diet.  I went into it not liking beans much, and it has only been fairly recently that I have overcome the aversion to beans that I developed during that time.

  I probably made every mistake that can be made cooking beans.  I salted them too much, or forgot the salt completely.  I put too many beans in the pot, so that as they soaked up the water they expanded and rose out of it.  I left the fire too high and boiled the pot dry, burning the beans.  And I never learned to like bologna flavored beans.  To me, bologna was a cold cut, lunch meat, for sandwiches with mayonnaise and lettuce.  When they ate bologna sandwiches, they fried the bologna and sometimes added fried eggs.  *shudder*

  Potatoes were a problem, too.  I loved potatoes:  mashed, boiled with ham, roasted with beef, cheesy au gratin served as a main dish, and fried potatoes with fish fillets, fish croquettes, hamburgers, or steak.  The only kind of potatoes my mother in law cooked, and therefore the only kind my husband wanted to eat, were fried, and I didn’t fry them right for him.  I had learned to fry potatoes the way my father did, in thin slices, browned in fat then covered to steam until the slices softened.  Fried taters in that family meant diced and stir fried until they were crisp and edged with black.  I adjusted to everything but burning the potatoes.  I had to draw a line somewhere.

  My mother-in-law was more gracious about teaching me how to do things her way than I was about having to learn.  I was used to cooking to my own tastes.  The issue of food was the first one that aroused any resentment in me toward Ford and his family.  Their diet was bland, overcooked, and monotonous to me.  Most of the time, I did it their way, and I never went back to Daddy-fried taters, but I started collecting recipes from magazines, and trying out new ones from the cookbook occasionally, and Ford eventually adjusted to the added variety.

  Cuisine was not the only cultural difference we faced.  We had some language problems, too.  I tried a few times to correct my husband’s grammar and pronunciation, but it made him angry and I learned to stifle the impulse.  It didn’t take me long to learn to stifle my fears and complaints, too.  I did worry, and one evening that winter, we were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed talking.  I was cold and feeling frightened and insecure about the future, and I started crying, holding onto Ford for comfort.  He shoved me away from him, jumped up, and yelled at me to stop crying.  As he stormed out the door, he was shouting that he was all fed up with my sniveling and he wasn’t going to fuck with me any more.

  I was devastated.  Suddenly, our money worries didn’t seem so important.  My marriage was in trouble and my sex life was ended.  I sniffled and sobbed a little while, and I paced the floor wondering if he would ever come back.  Finally, I perched in the middle of the bed and wrapped myself up in one of the featherbeds.  I just sat there with my chin on my knees, gazed into the glow from the little gas heater, and worried and stewed.  Ford wasn’t gone very long.  He had walked over to his mom’s house and watched a little TV and cooled off.

  I told him I was sorry for being such a baby.  He just grunted an acknowledgment and said, “let’s get in bed.”  When he reached for me as if he wanted to make love, I sobbed involuntarily, and wrapped my arms around him.  I wailed, “you said you were never going to do it again.”  He backed off and looked at me like I was nuts.  I quoted what he had shouted on his way out the door, and he laughed and explained that to “fuck with” was a whole different thing from just plain fucking.

  Ford’s mom was pregnant that winter, due in early spring.  His stepfather was excited about becoming a father.  My mother-in-law was big as a house, uncomfortable, and having trouble with swollen ankles and other gestational ills.  I listened to the women of the family talking about their childbirth experiences, and started really wondering what I’d gotten myself into.  I was pregnant too, conceived my first daughter about a month and a half after we got married.  I didn’t know it right away, because my periods had never been regular and I had some spotting in the early months of the pregnancy.  It was morning sickness that lasted all day, and some visible changes in my body, that clued me.  By the time I went to a doctor for confirmation, he said I was over two months along.

  Only one other incident from that winter in the old house in Vernon stands out in my memory.  Some friends invited us to go to a dance with them, at a roadhouse in the country.  I dressed up in the white dress that had been my favorite dressy outfit since I got it for Easter when I was about twelve.  We rode out there with two other couples and were having a good time.  Ford danced with me some, and left me to go out in the parking lot with his friends.  They were drinking, I learned later.

  He came back and led me by the hand out the door and to his friend’s car, and started kissing and fondling me, wanting to get in the car and make love.  It was too public, and we had our own warm, soft bed at home, so I resisted and asked him to come back in and dance with me.  Jokingly, I said a line I’d heard in a movie, “Let’s not get horizontal about it.”

  He punched me… in the nose.  My nose bled all down the front of my favorite white dress, which at the time distressed me more than the damage to my face.  The next day, both of my eyes were black and my nose was hugely swollen.  Ford said he was sorry, and it would never happen again.  I couldn’t get the bloodstains out of the dress, so I never wore it again.

  

  • 11:32 pm
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