February 15, 2008

• North Texas, 1960

  This is a continuation of my life’s story, which previously left off here.

  I wanted to be a good mother.  My daughter Marie was the one bright spot in my life.  Eventually, I became so afraid of my husband, “Ford,” who would become enraged every time she cried, that I did whatever I could to quiet her.  That ran counter to what I was being told by experienced mothers and had read in baby books.  I understood that a baby would not be harmed by letting her cry when there was no serious reason to pick her up, such as hunger, pain, or a soiled diaper, but I knew that letting her cry and having her father beat us both up for it would not have been in our best interests. 

  Strap-on baby carriers hadn’t been invented yet.  If I had seen pictures of little African or Asian babies in slings in National Geographic, it did not occur to me to improvise one.  Her father wouldn’t have approved of my wearing her in a sling anyway.  He resented every scrap of my attention I gave to her.  When he wasn’t around, she was usually in my lap or on my hip.  Whenever she was awake when he was around, I kept her near me in her little plastic seat, and touched and talked to her a lot, but she cried every time she saw Ford.

  One time, I had laid her on the bed to change her diaper, and she started crying.  She had to have been three months old or less, because we moved away from the house where this happened when she was around that age.  Ford yelled from the other room for me to shut her up.  I was cooing to her, trying to get the diapering done so I could pick her up and comfort her, but she kept squalling.  He screamed another threat from the other room, and I laid a hand over Marie’s mouth, instinctively, unthinkingly, desperately trying to quiet her. 

  At my move, she cried harder, he screamed louder, and my hand moved down to her throat.  I saw my hand around my baby’s throat, and was appalled.  How could I even think it!?  I hadn’t thought it.  I’d just done it, unthinking.  Not bothering to pin a clean diaper on first, I picked her up and paced, patting and rocking her in my arms until she quieted.  Then I sat on the bed, held her with one hand and managed to pin a diaper sloppily around her with the free hand.  I felt physically sick, remembering this, years later, watching the final episode of M*A*S*H.

  I was beginning to suspect that the only love there was in the world was love/hate.  I loved and hated my mother, and the things she said and did to me indicated that she felt that way about me.  I  had thought that my love for Ford was pure, until he taught me to fear him.  He told me that he loved me, never said he hated me, but his actions said what he never expressed.  I loved Marie with all my heart, but didn’t the fact that my hand just crept around her throat when her crying had posed a threat to both of us… didn’t that indicate that my love for her wasn’t pure and complete?  I hated myself for being such a lousy wife and mother.

  Ford bought an old 1938 Plymouth coupe, gray, for $50.00, which was more than my budget allowed for groceries each month.  One of his days off, we left Marie with my mother and went out on back roads through the cow pastures and oil fields, so he could teach me to drive.  I did okay until I turned a corner.  I just held the steering wheel through the turn, neglected to straighten it out fast enough, and ended up in the ditch.  No harm done, but he knocked me around for it after I drove the car out of the ditch.  Was I never going to do anything right?  He asked and I had to wonder.

  Ford had been working on a highway construction job he’d found after he came back to Vernon from Amarillo.  He got laid off or fired that winter, and the next job he got was in Jacksboro, down in the middle of the state.  His stepfather got the job as an oil field roustabout for him, and arranged for us to rent an apartment in the home of an old friend of his.  The apartment was beautiful, but I recall nothing else about Jacksboro.  I spent all my time at home. We were not there very long before he got fired.  One thing I do remember was having to take Marie into the shower with me to get her clean, because she cried when I tried to put her in the sink.  It seemed to me that whatever I had to do, I had to get it done while juggling a baby.

  I’m not sure whether we stayed out our first month’s rent in Jacksboro, or went back to Vernon immediately when Ford got fired.  I remember that he told everyone he was “laid off,” which implies no blame, but I know he was fired for some mistake he made that did damage and/or caused an injury.

  Back in Vernon, I guess we must have stayed a while with his mom and stepfather.  I don’t recall, but don’t know where else we could have gone.  My mother wasn’t in Vernon any more.  In the month or less that I had been in Jacksboro, Mama had left Bill, my stepfather, and “run off” with Grady O’Neal, the uncle of my old boyfriend, Glenn.  I didn’t know Grady… at least I don’t recall ever having met him until I ended up at their place in California later on.  He must have swept my mother off her feet, or maybe she was just so fed up with inane Bill and his insane sister Bee that she would have taken off with anyone.  Mama was almost fifty years old then, and I have never been certain that she and Bill had legally tied the knot, so it seems funny to say she ran off with another man, but that’s what everyone said.

  Ford found a job in Vernon, mopping hot tar onto flat roofs.  We moved into an apartment upstairs over the landlord’s garage.  It had two big, square, high-ceilinged rooms with a bathroom between them, and an old swamp box air conditioner hanging in a window of the front room where our bed and Marie’s crib were.  The stairs (picture at right of Marie was taken on the little square landing at top of those stairs, outside our door) were steep, narrow, splintery wood with the pale green paint peeling off, and the front door faced the bathroom door, with the kitchen to the left and front room to the right.  It was spacious but bare, the sparse furniture was old, battered, and mismatched, but the rent was cheap and the landlady didn’t mind if we came in and used her telephone.

  That July, I’d gotten a sunburn.  I got sunburned whenever I got out in the sun, until I moved to Alaska.  That one was particularly bad, second-degree burn with big blisters on my shoulders and back.  I couldn’t stand to lie down to sleep, and remember sitting on the floor, resting my forehead on the seat of a chair, dozing a little off and on through a particularly hot and humid night.

  Marie was fussy from the heat and teething.  I was groggy from lack of sleep and distracted by Marie’s fussing and the pain of my sunburn, but I managed to make a pitcher of iced tea and have supper ready for Ford before he was due home from work on a Friday.  He came in late, having hung around to drink a few beers with the guys after work.  I had already fed Marie, had eaten a light meal, and was drowsing in front of the air conditioner when he came in.

  I greeted Ford, told him his food was on the table — a cold meal including potato salad I’d spent the morning cooking and chilling, because nobody would want hot food on a day like that — and the next thing I knew he was kicking me and screaming because I’d put all the ice cubes in the pitcher of tea and forgotten to refill the ice tray.  He dragged me to the door and threw me down the stairs, then turned back and started working over Marie, who had started crying in her crib when he started screaming.

  I crawled back up the stairs and pleaded with him to leave her alone.  Eventually, I got her away from him, left him passed out there and ran to the landlord’s house.  I was bloody and there were splinters and paint chips sticking in the broken blisters on my shoulders.  I couldn’t think of anyone to call besides my mother-in-law.  She recommended that I call their pastor.  The preacher was out, but his wife set up an appointment for me on the following Tuesday, to come in for counseling.

  I kept that appointment, and by then Ford had sobered up and expressed the usual remorse for hurting me even if I had asked for it.  The preacher read to me some passages from the bible that said a woman should submit to her husband, and that was that.  Everyone seemed to think it was all my fault.  Life went on.
  

  • 6:04 pm
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