Chapter 4: Backslider
When Doris married Thomas Hawks, she shed the dowdy persona of holy-roller and morphed into a sexy, fun, smart, well-organized businesswoman. She helped run her husband’s clinic and together they co-chaired the American Cancer Society in our county. We traveled around to country schoolhouses and showed a film about the signs and symptoms that could lead to early detection. I gave little red plastic lapel pins as favors to classmates. Mother cut her long black hair and began wearing makeup, spring-a-later pumps, sheath dresses. Men sat up and noticed. Thomas was proud to show her off. She became what was known in the Assembly of God Church as a “backslider.” Living in Arizona with Daddy, I missed the genesis of this transformation. By the time school was out and I rejoined my sister in Oklahoma, Mother was already a different person, a stranger to me.
Mother, my new stepfather, and sister picked me up from whoever brought me to Oklahoma, usually a relative who hadn’t intended to go that far. Dr. Hawks was driving and Mother, bossy as ever, was telling him where to go, south of town on some mysterious errand. He drove to a shabby establishment known in our part of the world as a beer joint. Oklahoma entered the union as a “dry” state, and the sale of liquor by the drink and “strong” beer has had a lengthy and contentious history in the state. Today all 77 counties are “wet,” but when I was growing up, beer joints enjoyed an uneasy tolerance straddling county lines. The new husband went inside and came out with one open bottle of beer, which he handed to Mother. To my utter astonishment, she drank it.
It is typical of Doris that she drank the beer as if downing medicine. She was never a social drinker. We didn’t keep liquor in the house or serve wine with dinner, never threw a party where cocktails were served (actually we didn’t throw parties at all), never packed an ice chest with cold beer to take to the lake. And Dr. Hawks, who it seems gave up drinking cold turkey, never tried to curb her. In fact, Doris would later claim, on the rare occasions she admitted to drinking at all, that Thomas “made” her an alcoholic.
Her old-time religion required her to justify drinking alcohol. She was agitated and needed to calm herself. She was tired, she had worked too hard. She was going out of her mind. She needed to sleep. In some sense Doris recognized that she was trying to alter her brain chemistry. She took up smoking in similar fashion, a few quick drags to get the chemical fix. Neither habit was about the pleasure. Eventually Doris would turn to pharmaceuticals to manage her moods, central nervous system depressants—downers. What she really wanted was to sleep.
Mother loved the liveliness and excitement of a Pentecostal service, the stirring music, the fiery oratory. Our first home in Antlers was the Great Lakes mobile parked next to Antlers Inn, next door to the Methodist church, which I decided would be my church. Methodists didn’t scream or pass out. The preacher was a dignified man who made no impassioned pleas for you to come down front and accept the Lord as your personal savior. Mrs. Barham let me join the choir and wear a beautiful satin robe and stole. I loved to sit up front and look out at the congregation the way the preacher did.
Mother said that Methodism wouldn’t get me into heaven. It was only a step away from Catholicism, a deeply suspicious belief, akin to devil worship, praying to Mary, obeying a Pope. We were not prejudiced against Jews because we didn’t know any. I read Marjorie Morningstar and became fascinated with Jews. There were other books about Jews in the Antlers library, a biography of Baron Rothschild, novels by Chaim Potok about Hassidic Jews in New York. What would a forelock look like? A ringlet on a man? I couldn’t picture it. I was an adult before I ever met a Jew.
Mother fell away from fundamentalism and didn’t get back to it till she retired and had all day to watch TV and become addicted to Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker. “Watch her cry,” Mother would say when I went to visit her in Oklahoma. The camera would pan in for a close-up and on cue, tears would well up and melt the mascara on Tammy Fay’s spidery eyelashes and stream down her face. Mother loved the fake drama of daytime TV, passionate preachers and the bombshell exposes of Geraldo Rivera. She followed every breathless minute of the OJ Simpson trial. She watched twin TVs, both controls in her lap, captions on, muting one to favor the more salacious story.
Mother liked having two of things. The Antlers house had two kitchens. Her McAlester house had two dining tables, side by side, both set as if for a banquet, with plastic flower centerpieces and candlesticks, wine goblets, and gold tableware. There was never a meal served at either table. They were just part of the stage setting. In Oklahoma City, Mother maintained two completely stocked and furnished houses a few miles apart, though the second house was only for show. Two expressed the duality of Doris’s nature.
I was about ten when we made a pilgrimage to attend an Oral Roberts revival on the Oklahoma City fairgrounds, borrowing Paul and Blue’s camper and taking Grandma with us. My Daddy’s sister Nelie lived in Oklahoma City and one afternoon we left the fairgrounds and drove over to see her. Playing outside with a gang of children, I ran into a piece of jagged tin sticking out of some contraption in the side yard. Had it been eye level, it would’ve blinded me rather than just rip my shoulder open. It was the only time I ever fainted. I picked myself up and ran into the house and told Aunt Nelie that the ground came up and smacked me in the face.
That night Mother pushed me to the front of the prayer line ahead of adults with terrible disabilities so that Oral Roberts could lay his hot hand on my forehead. “Jesus, heal this child!” he thundered. Mother was thrilled that I had given her a reason to approach the miracle worker, a man who had once brought a child back to life. (When skeptics questioned Reverend Roberts’ claim, he admitted the child might’ve just been unconscious.) And I guess it worked. I didn’t get stitches or catch tetanus although I do bear the scar to this day.
I think there were always two personalities in my mother, Pentecostal music and ecstatic praise being outlets for the occult personality. When she backslid and fell away from the church, there was no outlet for the other Doris. Alcohol freed her of moral constraints, preacher’s wives who made her remove a pretty pin from her blouse, Jesus monitoring blasphemous thoughts and words, the reins on her libido. The night Betty and I were sent to the neighbors, the dark aspect was fighting to come out. When finally unleashed, the she-devil would smash everything, wreck Doris’s marriage with Thomas, further fragment the already unstable lives of her children. Throwing off the shackles of fundamentalism, Doris would indulge her sexual appetites and embarrass us having affairs with boys we went to school with.
Everything sober Doris created, drunk Doris would destroy. Over and over my mother would reduce herself to poverty, then work her way back with extraordinary focus and intelligence, aided by the self-denial she learned in girlhood. Despite the many times she wiped out, Doris would buy her daughters houses and businesses and leave an estate that would support her fifth and last husband Larry after she was gone.
I longed to have a mother like the ones I imagined my friends had. I had to grow up to realize that other families had secrets, a drunk or abusive parent, a mentally ill uncle, or were so poor they carried the shame into adulthood. I hated Mother’s Day when, sitting in the choir, I looked out at all the ladies wearing a pink rose if her mother was alive, a white one if she had passed. Throughout life, when friends extolled their moms, talked about how she loved them, what she did for them, how they missed her, I would say, I didn’t have that kind of mom. Mine tried to kill me. It’s a sure way to kill a conversation. You learn to keep your horror stories to yourself. She gave you life, what more did you want?
I especially envied my best friend Mary Lynn Tims, a girl on crutches, which tells you how I rated my own life. Somehow Mary Lynn missed out on Salk’s miraculous vaccine, which Mrs. Tims blamed herself for. Over and over she had to leave her little girl at Shriner’s Hospital in Shreveport and go home to care for her healthy children, three boys. Mary Lynn called it her “little leg.” Surgeons performed a series of bone grafts to keep the leg roughly the same length as the growing leg, but the leg had no strength and Mary Lynn wore a brace like Franklin Roosevelt’s, only a single. Each surgery entailed a lengthy convalescence and school at the hospital kept Mary Lynn up with our class.
She was Antlers’ own poster child, blonde and pretty, outgoing, and on crutches. She learned to be gracious accepting the pity and prayers—and sometimes dollar bills—thrust on her by well-meaning adults. They might not know her personally, but they knew her father. Ben Tims was our postmaster.
Every classroom used to be equipped with a large wooden paddle, some with holes drilled in them to raise blisters on your butt, or so we kids told each other. Miss Sadie’s instrument of correction was a wooden ruler. Misbehavers administered their own whacks standing in front of the class, humiliation being the key aspect of the punishment. We all thought Mary Lynn was exempt from the wooden ruler, and maybe she took advantage of Miss Sadie’s good graces once too often, because one day the teacher pounced. We watched, horrified, as Mary Lynn stood up and locked her leg brace on either side of the knee. Leaving her crutches at her desk, she clunked to the front of the classroom. Tears of shame rolled down her cheeks as she whacked her good leg.
Mary Frances, Mary Lynn’s mother, was an artist. She had a greenhouse and once raised a pineapple from the stem of one they ate. When you went to their house, she dropped what she was doing to sit down and talk to you as if you were genuinely interesting, something my mother never did. I’m glad that in the lottery of life Mary Lynn drew Mary Frances for a mother instead of Doris. It would’ve been too cruel for life to give her both polio and my mother.
Tribute to Mary Lynn Tims Maxwell (1946-2015)
In the Class of ’64, we each grew into the roles we would play throughout our lives, cast in that role from our own nature or group dynamics. We were good at sports, or we liked to write, or we were the class cut-up, class president.
Mary Lynn was Best Friend. Not just to every kid in our class, but every kid in school. You could say the entire population of Antlers counted Mary Lynn as Best Friend. People were forever stopping her wherever she went to say hi, give her a hug. People knew her because she was the girl on crutches. She could not hide or minimize her difference. Her vulnerability made people protective, I guess, and she radiated back the love we had for her with all her great heart. No one ever cherished family and friends more than Mary Lynn.
She had so many talents, that girl. She could write and paint. She had a bright inquiring intelligence and an open mind, a dry sense of humor. She loved to talk, loved to tell stories. She had a delicious sense of irony. She longed for the freedom the rest of us took for granted, that we could walk, skip, run.
Our friend Mary Lynn is no longer tethered to this earth with leg brace, crutches, wheelchair. She is free. We loved you, sweet friend.—Linda Glass Bingham, Jun 8, 2015
*****
We had always been sent off to live with relatives, although people didn’t have to be kin to us for Mother to pack us off with them. Christmas 1962, Aunt Hermione’s daughter Winona Winn brought her family to Antlers for the holidays and returned to Kansas with two extra passengers, me and a yellow tomcat named Tigger. Bill Winn didn’t have the guts to stand up to my mother and smoldered all the way to Fowler. At dinner that first evening, he reached across the table and took my glass of milk. “That milk is for my children,” he said. I wrote about my time in Kansas in “The Power of the Pen,” and thanks to the power of the world wide web, I heard from Kansas classmates I hadn’t seen since 1963.
I was barely settled back home in Antlers when Aunt Betty’s adult daughter Betty Joan turned up in Antlers. (We have a lot of Bettys in our family.) Somehow, Betty Joan and Doris became rivals for a local man named Guy Emory. Doris must have won, because Betty Joan headed home to California and took me with her. We tarried in Arizona for a few days of what could only have been an abbreviated fling with my cousin Gerald, who, come to think of it, was Betty Joan’s stepbrother. She was worn out by the time we left Globe and there was a lot of desert to cover. She threw me the keys and said, “Wake me when we get to Needles.” I was fifteen and had a learner’s permit.
Betty Joan’s parents, Uncle Leonard and Aunt Betty, were relieved to see us when we finally arrived in Sylmar. They had come out to California to make a fresh start. Uncle Leonard said the husband had almost driven them mad playing “I Can’t Stop Loving You” on the stereo. He made a good living operating a catering truck and we helped out by rolling the mounds of quarters he came home with and eating the leftovers from his truck for supper. Those quarters enabled him to buy a beautiful new house in a stark neighborhood overlooking the San Fernando Valley. I never learned why Betty Joan up and left a houseful of company to drive 1,600 miles for a tryst with an Oklahoma man who lived in a mobile home, but I do know the sex drive can be a powerful motivator.
Doris didn’t give a moment’s thought to how I would reach La Habra fifty miles south of Sylmar. If she consulted a map at all, she might’ve reasoned that it was all part of Los Angeles. In fact, it is more than fifty urban miles, through Burbank, Glendale, and East Los Angeles. When Uncle Leonard finally had time to take me, Aunt Betty and Jay went along for the ride. Jay and I were the same age and had progressed to holding hands. Suddenly Aunt Betty turned around in the front seat and said to me, “Do you masturbate? It might clear up your skin.” I pulled my hand away from Jay’s and we never said another word to each other.
Perry Blankenship’s mother Mary Ona was Grandpa Perry’s sister. While I was in Kansas, Mother had been keeping company with Cousin Per (Pear) during a temporary hiatus in his marriage. His wife Frances, an Arkansas lady as homely as she was sweet, did not hold it against me that her husband was in love with my beautiful mother.
It didn’t occur to me then, but I have to wonder today if Mother even knew that Frances had come back home, that there would be a woman in the house she was sending me to. I know she was aware of the danger young girls face from strangers, from relatives, even from their own fathers. I was ten years old when she left me in Arizona with Daddy. Before she left, she took me aside and said, “Don’t ever sleep with your father.” I wasn’t sure why I shouldn’t do that, but it put me on alert and, at family reunion that year, when Uncle Leonard put Daddy and me on a fold-out couch in the living room, I fell off the edge trying not to touch Daddy.
Frances made sure I had a good time that summer. We went to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. We went to Redondo Beach and took a boat ride far enough out in the Pacific to make the land seem unreal. Frances went to the market before I got up in the morning and bought fresh cherries, a fruit I had never seen before. She cooked brown rice for my breakfast, another unfamiliar food. And before I went home, she gave me the address of her youngest brother Connie Smith, a sailor stationed in Key West, Florida, to whom I was still writing the following October during the Cuban missile crisis. He wrote that he couldn’t tell me where they were being shipped but that it made him afraid.
I ended up leaving Cousin Per’s house under a cloud. He was a surveyor who came home at mid-afternoon and drank beer steadily until bedtime. I would tease him, tell him I had put something in his beer. One time I dropped my pencil in his beer bottle, pointed end up. He was probably getting pretty annoyed with me. His work required him to type up reports and he did this at the kitchen table. Frances would start dinner and then we would sit down across from him to eat. Sometimes he kept on typing, by now having moved on to a letter to my mother. One night he typed “Frances is trying to read this upside-down.”
But it wasn’t the tricks I played on his beer or his love letters to my mother that caused the trouble between me and Cousin Per. It was learning what an awful racist he was. We had several heated debates on race relations and finally he came up with what he believed was the decisive argument. “You wouldn’t marry one, would you?” And I said, “I would if I loved him.” Perry Blankenship left his beer and went straight to the living room and called my mother. “Did you raise this child to marry a nigger?” I was on a plane headed to Oklahoma City the next day.
That fall, I played the corpse in a community Hallowe’en festival, lying in a real coffin trying not to grin as kids trooped through the fright line and peered into my coffin. When the event was over, I left the American Legion Hall wearing my costume, a shroud somebody’s mother had made for the occasion. I had my driver’s license by then and was driving an old Chevy that started with a pushbutton on the dashboard. Something about the look of the house warned me to be careful. Betty and I had learned to pay attention to subtle cues that Mother had pulled one. Instead of going to my own room, I went to the far end of the house and slipped into bed wearing what I had on.
Suddenly the light in the hall came on and Doris entered the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. To my horror, she was gripping the Old Hickory butcher knife. A blade was always her weapon of choice, so easy to lay your hands on, so domestic, so mundane. To this day I can’t have certain size and shaped knives in my kitchen. The demonic personality released by alcohol spoke in a gruff voice, chilling in its matter-of-factness, soliloquizing about my teenaged angst, how I faced a life of misery and she would be doing me a favor to kill me. As she droned on about my murder, I weighed my chances of escape, my agility and clear mind versus the demon’s blurry responses and evil intent. In a flash I slid from the covers and out the far side of the bed. I ran out of the room and threaded the length of Mother’s long, long house and rushed out to the old Chevy parked near the door, which, thankfully, started without a key. I didn’t have my glasses and would have to drive blind.
I was probably functionally blind before Mother married an optometrist but I didn’t get glasses until Thomas Hawks became my stepfather and we all got glasses. I couldn’t think where to go that time of night. Earlier in the evening I had been with the Smith twins, Sanford and Sandra, so I headed to their house. I marveled that I was experiencing actual irony. I had almost been murdered wearing a shroud!
A year later I would get even with Doris for the fright she put me through that Hallowe’en night, but revenge would have to wait my dating an undertaker’s assistant.
Betty and I became adept at staying alive, each of us developing our own techniques and strategies. My sister became caretaker and rescuer. I practiced avoidance and the ability to disappear abruptly. Our bedroom doors, side by side, were scarred from repeated attacks of the Old Hickory. Thomas brought home sheets of plywood to nail over the doors and installed latches on the inside so we could lock ourselves in. Crazy Doris hacked at the plywood like a movie slasher, leaving fresh gouges but never breaking through.
English ivy grew over the screens of my bedroom windows, making the light in my room perpetually dim and green. The first time I escaped my homicidal mother by way of the window, I had to rip through the ivy, which made escaping easier the next time. It was a 4’-drop to the ground below and I was barefoot and wearing a nightgown. In the moonless night I quickly became disoriented. I crossed our pasture but, mindful of water moccasins, veered away from the stock tank. I reached the barbed-wire fence that ran along the west side of the property and climbed through, crossed another field, and thought I must be getting close to a house because I heard a dog bark. I veered further to my left, hoping I wasn’t now making a circle and heading back to where I came from. I stepped on something sharp and could feel blood oozing from my foot. I floundered on, no longer escaping, but looking for help.
My mental map told me I was just east of the Antlers Y, that if I found a highway, it would be the one going north towards Clayton, not the one that went east past our house. I saw car lights through the trees and emerged onto a highway. I began walking, north I hoped, trying to stay off the cut on the inside of my right foot. A car came up behind me and I turned to face it, looking hopeful but not trying to flag it down. The car flew past, braked, and began backing up. I was terrified to get in with a stranger who might prove to be more dangerous than a drunk mother with a butcher knife. The car door opened and my mother said, “Get in.” She had homed in on me again. The monster was gone. She was just a pissed-off mother whose patience had run out. “I’m taking you to Mack!” she snarled.
We went home and she made me pack a suitcase. We set off immediately for Lubbock, three hundred miles away, me with a rag wrapped around my bloody foot, unable to put on a shoe. We made it as far as Lake Texoma before Mother got sleepy and had to stop. She pulled into Lake Texoma Lodge, a fancy place we couldn’t afford, but a safe place to park for the night. Mother got in the backseat and I curled up in the front. Somebody knocked on the glass. It was the manager telling us we couldn’t sleep in the parking lot. Mother told him we didn’t have any money and he went away and came back to say they would comp us a room for the night.
We got to Lubbock the following afternoon, my foot still wrapped in the bloody rag. Mother told Daddy that I was unmanageable, she was fed up with me. It was like the time when I was little and Daddy was ordered to whip me. He bowed to the pressure, but the minute she turned her back, we became fellow victims. He unwrapped my foot and doctored it. He asked me what happened and I told him about the Old Hickory, how she threatened to kill me. Daddy got angry, felt used, his loathing of Doris confirmed. I was left with a permanent reminder of my flight over the fields, a scar running laterally across the right metatarsal joint.
My junior year in high school I had to go out the window again. I don’t remember how the fight started. We usually blundered into those life and death struggles, entered a room to find that our mother had morphed into monster. Liquor has that effect on some people. A kitchen knife is the most readily available weapon, domestic violence of the most banal kind. This monster was easily offended. Your expression was enough to incite rage. Think you’re so smart, do you? So superior. I’ll show you. Locked in a desperate struggle on the floor, the knife between us, I had my fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her back, away from me. I didn’t want to hurt her but she made me. I got free and ran to my room, locked myself in, but I couldn’t stay there. I raised my window, unlatched the screen, and climbed out to freedom.
More experienced in this escape, I knew not to head west. I could see a light on at our neighbor’s to the east. I was dressed this time, had on shoes. No one was home next door but the screen was unlatched and there was a telephone on the back porch. I called Aunt Hermione.
Oh, dear, she said. Honey, I can’t take upsets like this. Maybe she had been through scenes like that herself back when Grandpa sampled his own moonshine and terrorized the family. She told me to walk out to the road so she could find me. She and Uncle Wilburn lived in town across the street from the high school. She put me to bed in a cot in the storeroom.
I woke up to find Aunt Hermione fumbling around as if she had forgotten what she came for. “Go back to sleep,” she whispered. Then she said, “Oh, no, you can’t go to sleep. Your father is here.” My aunt, a life-long heavy smoker, had always been a bit odd, like so many of the Perrys. Now she had starved her brain of oxygen and entered the first stages of dementia.
Daddy was relieved to find me alive. “I thought it was your blood on the floor,” he said.
“How did you know to come?” I asked him, bewildered. What was, he psychic?
“You called,” he said. “You said, ‘Daddy, help me.’”
“I didn’t call.”
Daddy had driven all night to save me, entered my mother’s dark house, and found a pool of blood on the floor where I had grappled with her and the knife that would’ve killed me. He said she was sleeping in that room and raised up and told him to go find a bed. Daddy was outraged. “Go find a bed!? Whose blood is this?” Doris said she had cut her finger. It was no insignificant injury. For the rest of my mother’s life, the little finger of her left hand was curled up and useless.
Daddy had a pretty good homing sense himself and headed into town to find me. We puzzled it out sitting at Aunt Hermione’s kitchen table. It was Doris who made that call, making him think his child was injured and in trouble, forcing him to make a desperate drive through the night to rescue me.
I was two months from finishing the school year and convinced that if I transferred now, I would flunk my junior year. I knew what the others didn’t know, that Mother would wake up and have no memory of what she had put us all through. The difference this time was that Doris had involved others, Daddy and Aunt Hermione, Uncle Wilburn who was on the school board and owned Berry Drugstore. There was nothing we could do but go see Mr. Jones to arrange my transfer to Tom S. Lubbock High School.
Ocal P. Jones was the kind of principal you wish all principals could be. A year earlier he had steered me into trig and solid geometry by showing me where I stood on the Stanford Binet IQ test, clustered at the top with the smart kids, Mike O’Neal, Cindy Shaw, Randy Snyder, and Naomi Frazier. Unfortunately, I’m innumerate and learned virtually nothing about sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, and cosecants except how to spell them, but taking four years of high school math would exempt me from college math and allow me to get my degree in three and a half years.
Mr. Jones listened to our plight and excused himself and left us sitting in his office. When he came back, he said he had found a teacher willing to board me for $25 a week, breakfast and supper included. I could finish the school term before I went to Lubbock.
I had taken typing and shorthand from Mrs. Minnie Jesson who lived alone in a tidy prefab house just down the hill from the high school. There was only one bedroom. I would have to sleep with her. I was used to making myself unobtrusive in whatever household I joined, though I had never lived in one so tidy and quiet as this one, nor taken my meals as David Niven did in Separate Tables, at a table set for one. I never saw Mrs. Jesson eat. She was as skinny as Aunt Ruth and I suspected that she didn’t.
I was not expected to wash dishes or do my own laundry. Mrs. Jesson had her own way of doing things. I was a paying guest, a lodger, and she didn’t intend I should become family. She laid my clean folded laundry at the foot of the bed for me to put away. She said nothing about the hours I kept, who I ran with. I came and went as I liked. There was no curfew. After the alternately controlling and permissive setting of Mother’s house, the sudden freedom was unnerving. I never got to know her or call her anything but Mrs. Jesson, as if we were always in the classroom. A story in an Elinor & Dot mystery is based on my time at Mrs. Jesson’s.
My best friend that year was Becky Allen. Her boyfriend Terry Pate pressed his buddies into service as dates for me, different every night because few kids had as much freedom as I did. I went out at least once with nearly every junior and sophomore male. When Becky started seeing Nicky Ward, Terry and I turned to each other. Once I came home to Mrs. Jesson’s house drunk on 2% beer and climbed in bed with her. Nothing fazed her. She didn’t even mention it the next day. The end of term came and I escaped the stultifying freedom of Mrs. Jesson’s household and went to live with Daddy.
If you’re wondering about my sister—three years more vulnerable than me—she was experiencing her own narrow escapes and being sent off to live with relatives and chance victims of Mother’s overpowering charm. As adults, we’ve made lists of the people we remember living with, some astonishing number. But whenever Mother wanted us back, no one ever put up a fight to keep us.
A year earlier, the night I escaped death at the hands of my mother and drove away in a push-button Chevy wearing a shroud, Mrs. Smith let me spend the night and wear some of Sandra’s clothes to school the next day. The twins plotted how they would hide me in a cabin in the woods and bring me food. At noon I went home to get my glasses and some of my own clothes, and Mother, with her uncanny sense of my whereabouts, came home before I could get away.
If she had suffered hangovers like a normal human being, Doris might’ve turned to pharmaceuticals earlier in her life. She knew about them from the 1950s when they were prescribed for her in Arizona during her first break with reality. But Doris not only didn’t suffer headache and nausea like most people who over-indulge, she didn’t suffer the guilt and remorse of remembering what she had done under the influence. The concept that a brain bludgeoned by alcohol is capable of operating in a black-out was unknown to us and our own minds rebelled at accepting that explanation as an excuse for going after us with a butcher knife. She had to know what she had done, but Doris was all innocent amazement. It must have been our fault somehow. We drove her to it. She had gotten too tired. She felt like she was going out of her mind. Not even splintery bedroom doors jogged her memory.
Sober, matter-of-fact, maddeningly reasonable, my mother informed me that I couldn’t go live with the Smith family because it would shame Dr. Hawks and hurt business. “Come home,” she said, “and you can drive the Mercury tonight and take your friends to Hartshorne to the football game.”
And that’s what I did, not for the dubious pleasure of driving the Mercury, or to preserve Dr. Hawks’ reputation, but because I had no other choice. I was fourteen. We didn’t even know where there was a cabin in the woods.
In the end it wasn’t me who embarrassed Dr. Hawks and drove him out of town. Doris did that herself. He moved his clinic fifty miles north to Wilburton and later to McAlester. There was a divorce, though divorce did not end their relationship as it had with my father. Doris was the half of the partnership who knew how to manufacture custom eyewear. Thomas needed her for the rest of his life.
For every awful story I can tell about my mother, I can tell ten more about her generosity and affection. No one ever adored me as my mother did when I was a little girl. And I was always her little girl, even when I was sixty years old. Hearing my voice on the telephone, she would cry, “Is that my little Linda? My baby girl? My darling little Linda?” In her handwritten account of her worst breakdown, which she blamed on getting the house exterminated, she calls me Angel 1 and my sister Angel 2. Our mother was both holy-roller and a woman with no moral compass, a child beater and a mother who literally gave us her last dollar, a teetotaler and a binge alcoholic, a health freak who nearly killed herself with an eating disorder. She was a study in opposites. Anything I say about her, the contrary is equally true.
When I became an alcoholic myself and sought treatment—it is a family disease—I learned that we come in all flavors. For some, the addition of alcohol makes us sweet and sloppy. For others the brain reacts as if to an allergen, making us crazy, even murderous. Some remember every embarrassing detail the next day. Others operate in a black-out and don’t remember what they’ve done. I’ve listened to heated disputes between sober alcoholics as to whether Asians and people of Native American descent have a greater susceptibility to alcohol. I don’t know the answer. Betty and I didn’t have a theory. We had survival instincts that saved us from serious injury or death at the hands of our mother.
She led a mysterious double existence, competent and disciplined in her normal aspect, a puking drunk who hooked up with questionable men when she jumped the traces. She would come to covered in bruises and not remember how she got them. She didn’t even remember the car wreck that broke her neck.
It was another of those times she disappeared. A hospital called me in Ada to tell me they had my mother. I left school and drove down to Paris and found her strapped to a big wheel with steel hooks embedded in her skull. The hooks were connected to a pulley system that kept tension on the neck bones until the break healed. She should have died or been paralyzed from such an injury, but she would live for another forty years and die in bed at her appointed hour.
Lovers came and went, disappearing suddenly, one step ahead of the law. I hated her for not remembering. I didn’t believe her. It was just a way to avoid taking responsibility for her own behavior, the things she did to us, the things she allowed others to do to her. In her memoir Lit, Mary Karr describes the rage and pity of children of alcoholics. You wish you could have a simple response, to just hate, to alienate yourself and never think of her again. But the mother feeling runs too deep. She once meant everything. She can never mean nothing.
Ultimately, Doris learned to live with her disability, substituting opiates for alcohol and tobacco. She exerted her manipulative skills to get prescriptions for Xanex from pharmacists, ophthalmologists, psychiatrists. She spent much of the last decade of her life sleeping.
Doris never really felt at home anywhere but Antlers. It’s where Grandma and Grandpa raised her, where she attended all twelve years of school. It was home. She continually escaped alien Arizona to get back to her Eden. She made it important to us, a drab little Oklahoma town that kids leave the minute they graduate. We were made to believe that Antlers was special and like so many others, we made our way back for the ritual of Homecoming, a weekend in June when the population of Pushmataha County briefly rebounds before declining again. Doris couldn’t go home, not after she set fire to a downtown building.
When Thomas Hawks left Antlers, Doris again had to make a living in a town with no jobs. She hit on the idea of opening a restaurant on High Street. Yes, food service was an odd choice for a woman known to be a terrible cook, but as fervently as Florence Foster Jenkins believed she could sing, Mother believed she could cook. Actual food that people would pay to eat. I was eighty miles away going to college and my only contribution to the enterprise was to hand-color the menu covers. I pointed out to Mother that she had misspelled “restaurant” in both the menu and her sign, but she was equally sure of her proofreading skills and implied that I was, as usual, being overly critical.
I went down to Antlers a few weeks after the place opened and found three businesses in one, an optical shop, a taxi stand—Bill Glover sat by a phone drinking coffee and waiting for calls, his car parked at the curb—and a café that consisted of a row of tables and a few stools pushed up to a bar. My hand-painted menus were already greasy and bent. Mother cooked in a dark kitchen at the rear.
A tired Doris was a dangerous Doris. Behind the counter she stocked bottles of cheap wine—served without a license, I’ll warrant—and when I arrived that Sunday afternoon, seemingly the only person in the entire business district was Mother, alone and smashed. I don’t remember quarreling with her. My obvious disgust was enough to incite her. She would thrash it out of me, my sniffy highfaluting judgment. Who was I to look down on her? It shames me to remember that scene, wrestling on the floor with my mother, trying to break away without hurting her, without getting hurt. I had arrived in my college girl freshness and I limped away from Hawk’s Restaraunt (sic) dirty and crying, scratched and bleeding.
At the bottom of High Street is Antlers Police Station, remembered in the Elinor & Dot novels as being closer to the library than it really is. I could see a man sitting outside, an old deputy with a silver star pinned to his shirt. I would report her. I had never sicced the law on her before, but she had attacked me in a public place. He would see what she had done. I would have her arrested for assault. “Go on, get out of here,” he said, shooing me like a dog. “We don’t get involved with family business.”
Days or weeks passed. Aunt Hermione called me in Ada to see if I knew where my mother was. Hawk’s Restaraunt (sic) had burned to the ground and Doris was missing. An empty gas can was found in the alley. I told my aunt that I had no idea where my mother was and, furthermore, didn’t care. More time passed. Aunt Hermione called again. Doris had turned up at Coyne-Campbell Sanitarium in Oklahoma City. A psychiatrist wanted someone from the family to come talk to him. My aunt said her nerves were too fragile to make the trip.
On the drive up to the city I rehearsed what I would say to this doctor. I would tell him the truth. Maybe, finally, Doris would be held accountable for her actions, for trying to kill us, for burning down a building, for wrecking cars, screwing the boys we went to school with. Maybe he had the power to lock her away so she couldn’t hurt anybody ever again.
My mother, he told me, was a paranoid-schizophrenic with a narcissistic complex. Today the diagnosis would probably be “borderline personality.” She had suffered a complete psychotic breakdown. In addition, she displayed classic symptoms of repressed homosexuality and had accused all her former husbands of being queer as well as the woman in the next bed. They had moved her off to a corner of the women’s ward, but even there she had caused trouble by demanding they unlock the window next to her bed so she could get some fresh air. They said they couldn’t do that, so she broke a hole in the glass near her head, but the joke was on her because there was a second pane of glass on the other side of the mesh screen.
Frankly, my mother was a handful. It was oddly gratifying that a professional had come to the same conclusion. I told him about the drinking, how she claimed not to remember. He added alcoholism to her list of disorders and prescribed a regimen of shock therapy, not the old barbaric kind where patients were sometimes accidentally cooked, but a new and improved kind. They used sugar.
Insulin shock therapy or insulin coma therapy was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks. It was introduced in 1927 by Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sakel and used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favor and being replaced by neuroleptic drugs in the 1960s. –Wikipedia
A few weeks later I visited Mother again and she complained about how fat she was getting because of the sugar they pumped into her. If before there was any pretense of her not remembering, it was real enough now. Shock treatments wiped her memory. There were decades of her life she couldn’t remember. When the heat died down, Mother signed herself out and married teenaged Bill Glover the taxi driver, her third husband, one of my classmates. Bill had just gotten his draft notice and Mother went to live in Lawton while he went through basic training at Fort Sill. She settled in Oklahoma City to wait for him to come home from Vietnam.
I don’t know much about that period of my mother’s life. I got my degree and moved to Houston to begin what I hoped would be a long estrangement from her. My sister sent me a newspaper clipping about a suspicious fire in the boarding house where Mother had been living. Coincidence? Probably not. Bill Glover came home from overseas a different person, Mother said. She divorced him and married again, somebody named Harley who worked at the Dale Evans school in Oklahoma City. It was her briefest mésalliance.
Every divorce ruined her financially, forcing her back into food service, waiting on tables now, rather than owning her own restaurant. It was while working in a busy Denny’s in Oklahoma City that Doris met her fifth husband Larry Niehaus, the dishwasher, also a teenager, but with military service behind him. He had been kicked out of the Marines for psychological reasons. Larry had a lot of problems, apparently caused by fetal alcohol syndrome. Like Uncle Bud, he had a sweet nature but was incapable of living on his own. Doris claims she looked into adopting him but decided to marry him instead. Betty and I boycotted the wedding and Doris sent pictures. She’s wearing a white dress and bridal veil. Her bridegroom could be her son except that she’s so dark and he’s so fair.
By then my sister was married and had her first daughter. I went up for Christmas that year and Doris and Larry brought presents to the door. Cold bitches that we were, we didn’t invite them in. Eventually we warmed to Larry and came to appreciate that we didn’t have to worry about our mother anymore. He brought stability to her chaotic life and helped her rebuild her finances. When she was on a toot, Larry locked the front door of the clinic and looked after her, waited for the storm to pass. He only called us if she had to be hospitalized.
Mother sold the Antlers house and bought one on a commercially zoned street in northwest Oklahoma City. She and Larry lived and worked in that house for the next thirty years. Mother turned the kitchen into an optical lab, the front room into a dispensary and office. The front bedroom she lined with pegboard and hung with frames. She enclosed the garage and bought a chair and phoropter. She trained Larry on the machines and paid Dr. Hawks so much per head to do her exams.
On the day the doctor was in, Mother ushered people through, handled frame selection and fitting, collected the money. Larry worked frantically in the kitchen cooking up glasses. A separate building out back was their bedroom. Mother’s houses always ended up a warren of rooms on different levels, a hodgepodge of rooflines, with intermittent floods and plumbing problems. When she sold a house, it was only fit to be bulldozed.
She was shrewd and thrifty, which enabled her to accumulate wealth, although she didn’t need much for herself. She bought her clothes from Goodwill, mostly white clothes, lab coats and white nylon pants, a technician you could trust your eyes to. I got all my glasses from Mom. We all did. She made glasses for Kathy Whitmire and for my college roommate Phillis, without ever having met either. She would send me a box of frames and we would sit at my dining table with mirrors in front of us, trying on frames, giving each other our opinion. People used to write Mayor Whitmire and ask her where she got her glasses.
Periods of relative tranquility were interrupted by breakdowns, some severe enough to put Mother in the hospital. Once, my sister drove her to the state mental hospital while Mother cowered in the floorboard pulling out her hair. Betty and Larry kept the business running until she was well enough to come home.
Thomas had a girlfriend named LouAnn who lived in Paris in a home she refused to leave. Thomas was equally tied to his business in McAlester a hundred miles to the north. He commuted in a triangle between LouAnn, Mother, and his clinic, and required a comfortable car to do so. Mother lent him money to buy a new Cadillac. Over the years there were more loans, more Cadillacs. Mother always made him sign a note. By the time Thomas Hawks died, Mother owned his real estate, which is how she ended up spending her retirement in McAlester.
There’s a distressing history of arson in our family which may be why I invented arson investigator John Bolt, to clear up the little mysteries in my life. Thomas Hawks’ final act before leaving the McAlester house was to set fire to the clinic. Mother had that part rebuilt and lived in the house another two decades. She kept her collection of white couches in the new living room, along with her piano and Wurlitzer organ. The new wing, originally a garage, had the look of a furniture showroom, with a double row of couches down the middle, tables, lamps, sideboards, furnishings for display not for actual use.
Because my mother had once yearned for a piano of her own, she bought scores of instruments over the years and donated them to churches and individuals. She was the Johnny Appleseed of pianos. The one she sent to me followed me from house to house and may have influenced the career of my last husband. Despite owning a piano and being able to read music, I was crap on the keyboard. Without a lesson, Mother’s hands flew from one end to the other, Pentecostal style.
Thomas Hawks died in 2006 at the age of 81. He was blind when he died, ironic considering the profession he practiced. Also ironic that he and Mother bought adjoining burial plots in McAlester after having been divorced for years. As Mother neared her own end, she began planning how she could avoid occupying that plot. Thomas’s only child, our stepbrother Ronald Patrick, died just six years after his father, and Mother offered the spot to his family. She wouldn’t be needing it. She had donated her body to science.
Thomas’s house sat on acreage with numerous smaller structures strung out behind the main house, one of them a barn. Mother turned each of these buildings into a rental unit. Larry took courses in plumbing and wiring at the local junior college and turned out to be quite handy. Mother had a talent for attracting tenants capable of providing the level of entertainment her strange psyche craved, that is to say, chaos, change, disorder. McAlester police came to know the property well. There were bars on the windows and doors of her own house.
Betty and I grew weary of the tales of disaster, the constant need to interfere in the lives of these tenants. “Get rid of them!” I would tell her. And Mom would say, “Where would they go?” She was the unofficial social services, Mother Teresa of McAlester, last resort of the down and, but for Doris, homeless. They lost their jobs and couldn’t pay rent. They borrowed money for cigarettes and beer. Mother bailed them out of jail, took them to the hospital, buried them when they died. “You’re just enabling those people,” I lectured. “It’s my money. If I want to help poor people, I will,” she replied.
She relished her role as queen of the little kingdom of Doris, the only one smart enough to support not only herself but carry a dozen others with her. She identified with their misery. Desperate young mothers lived there. Babies were born there. Old men died there. Several varieties of con artists made it their base of operations. Mother cared about them all, never forgetting that she came from a little house in the woods crammed with sisters and aunts living off what Grandma could raise, Uncle Bud gather, and Grandpa shoot or catch in his seine.
When we were little, Mother used to sweep through our closets and drawers gathering up our excess and we would drive to the country and give our old clothes to some pitiful woman and her half-starved kids. Etched into my memory is the scene we found in one desolate shack during a cold snap when the woman was breaking up a wooden chair to feed the fire.
I hated going to see Mother. We all did, and she didn’t like it much either, but we went as often as required to assuage our guilt. Mother got even weirder as she aged. I might not have seen her for three years, yet her first comment would be to remark on how fat I had grown or how skinny. And what had I done to my hair? Greetings dispensed with, she would send you out the door again. “Larry, take them to the Steak House.” You were wise to take the offer, too, because Doris didn’t keep food in her house. She didn’t want Larry eating it while she was asleep. A corollary to her eating disorder was controlling the consumption of others. Larry got very fat after Mother died. Our room was in the newer wing, the doll room, we called it. We were part of the collection.
On the off chance you’re unfamiliar with estate sales as practiced in Oklahoma and Texas, let me set the scene for you. Prior to the sale, the auctioneer has been busy clearing out old people’s homes, hauling away the furniture and household goods the children are grateful not to have to deal with. He pays them a nominal sum, a hundred bucks maybe for the contents of a house. He clears it all out, takes it all, the same deal he will offer his customers. No cherry-picking, you buy the whole lot.
When he’s accumulated enough merchandise to hold a sale, he arranges the goods on tables—lots—out in the country somewhere, possibly his own pasture where there’s room to park pickups and trailers. I did a website for just such an entrepreneur. He advertises the sale and buyers show up and eye the lots and decide which ones to bid on. Mother bought couches, American Girl dolls, gold-tinted tableware that came in velvet-lined boxes, occasionally a car she would immediately resell at a profit, and enough furniture, dishes, and linens to outfit her houses. Renters made off with her stuff but she didn’t really care because she could always get more.
The American Girl dolls stood on a high shelf ranged around the guest bedroom just off the rebuilt garage, their glass eyes staring calmly down at you. Mother made Larry vacuum regularly and sanitize bathrooms and kitchen, but dusting was not a priority, if even a concept.
One of Mother’s oddities was her insistence on boiling water for drinking. She kept a pair of big cauldrons on the stove for this purpose, one boiling, the other cooling. Even in intensive care, she talked the nurses into letting Larry bring in her own jugs of drinking water. Without the right water, she couldn’t go. The daily bowel movement came to dominate her life. She drank concoctions to shock the digestive tract, shakes laced with cayenne pepper, mineral oil, and god knows what else, the purgative regimen familiar to bulimics, I suppose.
The problem with her bowels began early in her relationship with Thomas Hawks. With his encouragement, she enrolled as a beginning freshman at Southeastern Oklahoma State in Durant. She rented a little apartment, signed up for classes, purchased textbooks, and fell ill. She came home and had surgery in Antlers’ small general hospital, possibly a tubal pregnancy. The surgeon removed several inches of colon and over time it became ever more difficult for her to manage her bowels. We urged her to see about getting a colostomy, but the idea horrified her. We didn’t know if her extreme dietary regimen was purging or only what she needed to do to eliminate. And what part did the prescription medications play? Opioids constipate.
When the end came, she was able to call us both to say goodbye, Betty in Seattle by then, me in Wimberley. She described death as Socrates did after drinking hemlock, creeping up from her legs. Larry had his instructions. Do not call an ambulance. She talked to us by phone and then she went to sleep. When Larry went to wake her the next morning, she was gone. There was a number for him to call. The University of Oklahoma School of Medicine collected our mother’s body and when they were done with it, they cremated the remains. Nobody was left in Oklahoma to collect the ashes. Larry got a thank-you card.
Doris Louise Livecy, Aug. 13, 1928 – Aug 12, 2010. 82-year-old Native American female, ill-nourished, with long black hair; multiple scars from surgeries and old injuries: cuts to the hands, tendon of left little finger severed, more recent scars from removal of breast implants; a pair of circular holes in the crown of the skull; fractured cervical bones; extreme trauma to the lower bowel….
Letter from my sister:
I did my best with mother’s wake, given what I had to work with. What started as Mother’s “doll collection” became full-blown hoarding, household goods she bought by the table at area flea markets and estate sales. Twelve people showed up, sad “fringe” folks who live on the compound, renters who pay when they can. Mother collected them, too—people—disabled, limited in skills and resources, disenfranchised, smokers, drinkers, addicts, people whose lives were marred by domestic violence, people with no teeth, unemployable, and invisible to most people. The cops were always being called to her place.
They sobered up, cleaned up, and asked what they could bring. I implored them to bring only themselves. Mother and Larry had been good to them. It looked like a Salvation Army soup kitchen, the folks who streamed through the back door to honor Doris, leaving plumes of cigarette smoke behind them, bringing inside their liquor breath. Without a hint of sarcasm, they expressed admiration for her excellent taste. Two young women, one with two babies, helped serve the pizza, salad, drinks, and chocolate cake Larry and I bought at Walmart. I spent two hard days cleaning to bring enough order to the main room so we could hold her service there. I created a shrine with her picture, and one of Elvis because he was a god to her. I had downloaded Elvis gospel and realized too late that I should have brought velvet Jesus in from the other room to add to the shrine. Maybe he was there in spirit.
When it was time to start, I was a little worried they would expect me to officiate, but suddenly the doorbell rang and I opened it to an elderly gentleman in suit pants held up with a pair of smart-looking suspenders. A preacher man. He came right in, made himself at home, told us how many years he had known my mother, even Thomas Hawks way back when. Haha, bet I didn’t know that. He didn’t actually know me but knew of me (sly pause as he held my gaze, suggesting he knew things he shouldn’t know). He knew some Antlers people. He mentioned a prison ministry, too. He was a multi-millionaire. Did I know that? Preacher man’s back was shaped like a question mark, his head out in front of his chest, dangling there like it hurt. It was hard to make eye contact with him, his head was so low. He would be honored, he said, to pray with us before we ate. He prayed wonderfully, saying all the right words that I would never have thought of myself. (Or if I did, wouldn’t have been able to say.) There wasn’t a dry eye when he finished. Poor Larry had rivers running down his face. I got a towel to mop him up.
After eating, our guests didn’t linger. Desperate for a smoke or drink, they crippled out the door in wheelchairs or on spindly legs, into the hot night to gather out back and talk about Doris, or about her city daughter. I could see the red glow of their cigarettes from mother’s kitchen window.
Preacher man doesn’t smoke or drink, nor does he have anywhere to go. I think he senses he’s in the presence of a sinner who needs saving. He gives it his best shot. With his prison ministry and all, he has a track record, but not bragging, I manage a little fancy footwork of my own, trying to distract, fluster. Finally, he stands to go, resigned, I suppose to leaving this sinner unsaved.
He’s the last person on earth I’d expect to say what he says next. “I’m nobody! Who are you?” The opening line to one of the few poems I have ever loved enough to memorize. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s quoting Emily Dickinson. “Are you—Nobody—too?” I reply. And then I know he’s for real. “Then there’s a pair of us!” he says. I walk him to the door and we recite the rest of the poem together.
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog
I’m astonished that preacher man showed up, that he prayed aloud and represented the hearts and souls of those in that room who believed in God. I didn’t want the memorial to be about me. It was a service fitting to the woman our mother was, and seemed to be what Larry, her husband of 35 years, needed. And those in attendance were exactly the people Mother would have invited in, the misbegotten. –Love, Bets
