March 20, 2008

• Rejected and Thrown Out

  This memoir episode comes after this one.  When I left off, it was July, 1960, and my husband, “Ford,” baby Marie, and I were living in an apartment upstairs over our landlord’s garage, for which we paid $35.00 a month.

  On the Friday that Ford came home from work and threw me down the stairs for not having remembered to refill an ice cube tray, he had lost the roofing job he’d had for a few weeks that summer.  I learned about it somewhat after the fact, when I tried to get him up for work Monday morning.  That time, he didn’t try to pass it off as being, “laid off.”  He had been fired because he refused to do something his boss told him to do.  The way he told it, it was all the other guy’s fault.

  Our rent was about up on the garage apartment.  We had lived there one month, after having spent I-don’t-recall how long at his mother’s place when we moved back to Vernon from Jacksboro.  With his final pay check from the roofer, we rented a cheaper place for $22.50 a month, and moved again.

  If that place had been a piece of jewelry, it would be a lump of mud in a priceless setting.  The frail ancient landlady lived on a corner lot, in one of the classiest mansions in town, but it had seen better days.  Her front yard, and a couple of blocks of that street, were shaded by huge old trees, a rare thing in that or any little North Texas town.

  The big grassy back yard was bordered on two sides by more big old shade trees.  The side adjoining the street had a wooden fence covered with vines and shrubs.  Where that fence ended next to the back corner of her house, was the gate into her back yard.  From that gate to the door of our apartment, a path worn by the feet of past tenants led diagonally across the lawn.  We lived in a dilapidated old wooden building that had once been the carriage house.

  My kitchen was the size of a closet, and its window overlooked the alley.  There was also one window in the other room, facing the landlady’s back yard, but almost completely covered by shrubbery, so that little daylight got in.  A bare bulb with a pull chain hung down in the center of the room on an old, frayed, braided cord with cloth insulation.  The place was home to mice, rats, and cockroaches.  Fortunately, there were also some spiders to deal with the flies.

  There was just enough space in the main room to squeeze between the foot of the old iron bedstead and the musty horsehair sofa, to get into the kitchen.  The sofa was where I made Marie’s bed.  Another space was just wide enough to let us pass from the door to one side of our bed, past an old 3-drawer chest and a curtain dangling across the corner, concealing the horizontal lead pipe which served as our clothes closet.  The other side of the old double bed was shoved up against the kitchen wall.

  The head of the bed was shoved up against the south wall of the old carriage house, which revealed several peeling layers of a kind of wallpaper I have never seen anywhere but in North Texas.  All of it was printed on heavy brown kraft paper, like that of old grocery sacks.  Each design was printed in two colors:  either green and yellow or green and red.  The green was for leaves and the other colors were for flowers:  either big gaudy roses or smaller unidentifiable blossoms.

  After a few weeks of desultory job hunting, Ford went to work as “lot boy” for a used car dealer.  He dusted the cars, or washed them after a rain had turned the dust to mud.  He kept tires aired up, batteries charged, and cleaned the interiors of the new arrivals.  After a while, he started telling me jokes or stories he’d heard from Harry, a salesman who worked there.

  Then, on a Sunday when the car lot was closed, Harry and his wife invited us over for spaghetti.  They lived in a converted garage at the end of the driveway that ran alongside their landlord’s house, but theirs was bigger and newer than ours.   Their bed was the only place to sit in their front room, and their kitchen table only seated two people, but there was room to move around, the kitchen appliances were shiny and new, and they had a TV.

  They had a cat but no kids, and Harry’s wife seemed a little embarrassed when she said they had been, “trying,” for several years to have a baby.  Her name might have been Brenda, and I’d be willing to bet it started with a B, but I honestly don’t remember.  I’ll call her Brenda, anyway.  Marie was about nine or ten months old when we started spending our Sundays with Harry and Brenda.  Brenda loved to hold her, and to supervise as she played with the cat.

  Much of the time when we were there, while Ford watched TV and Brenda played with Marie, I’d be in the kitchen with Harry, learning some of the secrets of a professional chef and showing him a few of the things I had learned from other cooks.  My spaghetti sauce recipe is almost identical to the one he prepared that first time we ate at their house, except for my addition of a dash of cloves.  Ground beef had always been the only meat in my meat sauce, until Harry taught me to add chunks of sweet Italian sausage, and minced pepperoni.

  I remember watching Ed Sullivan and Red Skelton there, and we probably watched other shows, too.  Someone on TV brought up “wife swapping,” and we discussed the idea.   For a couple of years, at that time, there had been a lot of buzz in popular media about wife swapping.  It’s an ancient practice in some cultures, but if it had been going on in the U.S. it was done very quietly.  In World War II and the Korean War, U.S. Air Force pilots consoled and comforted each other’s wives, and the practice had caught the public imagination by the end of the ‘fifties.  The androcentric label soon fell out of favor, and it became called, “swinging.”

  Brenda did not like the idea of wife swapping, and after expressing some more or less neutral and impersonal interest in the concept, I gauged Ford’s jealous temper and kept quiet.  I can imagine what went through Brenda’s mind as her gaze passed from her tall, good-looking, intelligent, articulate husband, to my sawed-off, brutish, stupid man.  After the one time it came up, the subject just died, I thought.   But it was fairly evident that Harry was interested in me.  He’d find opportunities to “accidentally” touch me as we worked together in his kitchen, and once when we were all seated on their bed watching TV, he ran his toes along the side of my leg in a surreptitious caress.

  Saturday night, September 17, 1960, Ford wasn’t home by dinnertime.  I had no idea where he was, no phone and no place to call and try to check up on him even if I’d had one.  I fed Marie, and put her to bed on the couch.  I probably ate a little something myself before putting the rest of the meal away to reheat for Ford when he got home.  Around 11:00 PM, after sitting in my bed reading for hours, I turned out the light, but couldn’t get to sleep.  Where was he?  Was he getting drunk?  It was payday… was he blowing his paycheck on booze?  I tossed and turned, fussed and stewed.

  Eventually, sometime in the wee small hours, I heard the creaky hinge on the gate.  Then I heard the sounds of someone trying to fumble the key into the lock on our door.  When the door swung open, I lay still and faked sleep, assuming that Ford was drunk, not wanting any sort of encounter with him.

  It wasn’t even Ford.  It was Harry.  He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, reached over, and touched my arm.  He spoke, and I jumped, startled.  I clutched the covers, turned to face him, and scooted toward the wall.  As he began to explain what he was doing there, I shushed him, afraid he’d wake Marie.  In whispers, he told me he had traded a half case of beer to Ford for our door key.  I knew he expected me to fall into his arms, but I was scared silly.  I told him, “no.”  He persisted.

  I didn’t fight, but it was rape.  That much I learned much later.  I was too scared to make any noise.  Frozen with fear, I couldn’t think.  It never occurred to me to grab Marie and get out of there.  He didn’t get much for the price of that half case of beer.  I submitted with the same lack of enthusiasm with which I had come to accept my husband’s drunken fumbling sexual attempts.  After a while, he apologized and left.

  Unable to sleep, I spent the rest of the night reading.  The sun was well up on a sweltering hot day, my sixteenth birthday, when Ford stalked in.  First thing he did was to ask me if Harry had been there.  As soon as I said yes, he started hitting me.  That beating ended up in the yard, and might not have ended until I was dead, if the landlady hadn’t intervened.

  Ford finally left, after telling me I’d better be gone before he got back.  He never wanted to see me again as long as he lived.  First, I packed clothes for Marie and myself into my old cardboard suitcase, a battered Depression-era object that my parents had owned before I was born.  Then, with Marie on one hip and the suitcase in the opposite hand, I walked the few blocks to Grandma Blackwood’s, the big old house where several generations of Ford’s stepfather’s family lived.

  I used the phone there to call my mother, who was living with Grady O’Neal, the uncle of my old boyfriend Glenn, on a bird ranch in San Timoteo Canyon, outside Redlands in Southern California.  She wired enough money for my train fare and a half-fare ticket for Marie.  One of Ford’s uncles by marriage drove me to the Western Union office and then to the railroad station, and I was gone, headed into the sunset, on my birthday.

  Continued Down on the Bird Ranch.

  

  • 4:24 pm
  • 13 Comments