Chapter 5: Teens
In 1957 Daddy was without family, living alone in Claypool, Arizona, a condition he must have found intolerable. Uncle Leonard had moved to California to work in the defense industry. Paul and Helen Cunningham had gone to Missouri to train as missionaries to South America. And I had temporarily rejoined my sister in Oklahoma. Uncle Troy invited his unmoored brother to come live with them in Lubbock where Daddy found temporary work driving a combine. I visited that Christmas and was waiting for him when he came home from the fields, his face black but for a white triangle from the bandana he wore to keep the dust out.
Daddy found permanent work driving for Lubbock Manufacturing, a family-owned business that built large pressure vessels for agricultural and industrial use, cylinders that looked like over-inflated butane tanks. He was one of two big rig drivers, his assignment to pick up steel as it arrived at the Houston Ship Channel. The US is third now in world steel production and, inefficient as it seems, Lubbock Manufacturing bought their steel from China and Japan. Mack delivered tanks to customers all over North America and Mexico, often driving in tandem with his buddy Bill Johnson.
Although he made the 500-mile trip to Houston regularly, I didn’t see Daddy very often. We were both working and his rig was too long to take into neighborhoods during high traffic. He was delayed once over the weekend and spent the night with us, his rig filling Hazard Street. A time or two I drove over to the east side of town to meet him at a Galena Park café where we had a glass of tea and a good chinwag. Usually, our reunions took place in Nocona amidst the larger reunion of the Glass family.
After the divorce, Betty and I were shuffled between our parents and relatives, even families we barely knew. I was eleven in 1958, living with Daddy in Lubbock, looked after by one adult female or another depending on Daddy’s work schedule. In two of those households was a 16-year-old cousin for me to emulate.
Price and Ruth’s middle child, Kenneth “Buddy” Glass, was clean-cut, wholesome, and would grow up to be an outdoorsman in the Pacific Northwest. Buddy wasn’t embarrassed to claim his mom as his best friend. A “total square” according to Troy and Hazel’s only child Kathleen, a sophomore at Lubbock’s newest high school, Monterrey. I was an impressionable 7th grader at O.L. Slayton and inclined to hero-worship whichever cousin I was around.
Kathleen reluctantly took me in hand and introduced me to rock-and-roll, bouffant hairdos, white lipstick, the fullest of nylon mesh can-cans. She taught me the lingo—square versus hip, queer versus straight, angel versus virgin. When a boy put his arm around me on the bus and whispered, “I’m stone diggin’ you, babe,” I felt I had successfully passed as a cool chick. I slavishly copied Kathleen’s white penny loafers and bobby socks rolled down precisely twice. I memorized the words to hit songs and didn’t tell on her for leaving me at the skating rink alone while she went off to make out with her juvenile delinquent boyfriend.
When Daddy came to live with them, Troy and Hazel bought a new three-bedroom house on Avenue A so he would have his own room. Daddy bought twin beds but I was too old to sleep in the same room as my father. I wanted to be in with Kathleen. She said I could stay if I didn’t tell her father that she smoked. She took the trouble to raise a window, though she needn’t have bothered, since all the adults smoked. Mother had put the fear of TB in me about smoking and I resisted the urge to copy that particular behavior. We didn’t yet know about second-hand smoke.
Uncle Troy bought an old upright piano and played vaguely recognizable tunes but it was my father who had the acknowledged talent among the Glass boys. At family reunion, Hack and Mack broke out the guitar and mandolin and picked bluegrass on the porch.
Before their move to Avenue A, Troy and Hazel lived on the east side of Lubbock on an unpaved street that ran between fields of cotton. The land was so flat that a good rain turned the entire area into a shallow lake and little black frogs hatched out by the millions, making driving and walking hazardous. Next door to us were Uncle Hack and Aunt Helen, their children Karen, Betty Gail, Larry Gene, and their youngest, Frank, who was named for our grandfather. The next several houses were occupied by Hazel and Helen’s parents and married brothers. Standley sisters had married Glass brothers, making their children double cousins. The front yards formed a playground that was a minefield of grass burrs and bull nettles.
Lubbock sits alone on the high plains, visible at night for an hour before you reach it. First you see the winking red lights of radio towers lined up across the horizon, the city below them hidden by the curve of the earth. You drive some more and begin to see the glitter of white lights spilling across the prairie like diamonds. Mother used to send us to Lubbock by bus, trusting me to look after my little sister. The bus didn’t get in till late and one night as we had begun to see the red lights of radio towers up ahead, off to our right, through the huge windows of the Greyhound bus, we could see a fierce lightning storm boiling and rolling across the prairie, moving in the same direction we were. We were the only children on the bus. I watched to see if the adults looked alarmed, as I would later watch stewardesses on airplanes to see if that turbulence we’re experiencing is anything to worry about. The storm and the bus seemed to be converging on the same vanishing point. What would happen when we met? Would the storm turn the bus over? Carry it up into the clouds? I thought I’d better pray, even though I had decided I was an atheist. My sister thought I was brave and I let her think so.
Lubbock is the best place in the world to listen to the radio, not a tree for a hundred miles to interfere with the signal. The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly. Kathleen and I spent Saturday nights in the Great Lakes trailer listening to the Hit Parade. The DJ started at one hundred and counted down to the #1 song in the nation, which I was never awake to hear. Kathleen bought a weekly magazine with the lyrics of that week’s hits and we memorized the words and pooled our allowance to buy 45 RPM records to play on her hi-fi.
On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash. Buddy Holly was a Lubbock native, and Kathleen and I took his death personally. Daddy said the world would be better off if all rock ‘n rollers were killed. I was equally scornful of his musical heroes, Ernest Tubb, Chet Atkins, Little Jimmy Dickens. We were always messing with each other’s pre-sets on the car radio. Crossover artists put us in uneasy alliance, Brenda Lee, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, Elvis.
On Saturdays, Daddy peeled off a twenty, an outrageous allowance, and told me to buy myself something pretty. Kathleen and I would catch the downtown bus and go to the beauty college to get our bouffants refreshed. Beauty students washed and rolled our hair on sinker-jets, sat us under the dryer, combed us out, and sprayed enough lacquer to hold us till the following Saturday. We didn’t start teasing, backcombing, getting big hair, till later in the ‘60’s. Looking so fine, we would bop into Woolworth’s to get our picture taken in the photo booth. I mailed my strip to Mother and Betty. I expected all my pictures to be waiting for me when I got back to Antlers, but Mother had thrown them away. I looked too skinny, she said.
Aunt Hazel worked for Underwood BBQ and came home smelling like smoked meat, which put her off BBQ, though sometimes she would bring it home for the rest of us. Uncle Troy, who also worked in the meat industry, drove a red company car with “Swift” painted on the doors which always made me snicker. After we moved to Avenue A, Kathleen got her driver’s license and was charged with delivering me to and from school in the family black and white ’50 model Ford. Lubbock was home to the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In where Buddy Holly and the Crickets once played. We always made several circuits through the parking lot to check out the action. Frequent gas wars meant we could top off the Ford’s tank with our lunch money so Uncle Troy wouldn’t know how much cruising we did.
Uncle Troy didn’t like his only child Kathleen and she would go on to wreck her life to make him sorry. One Saturday when Aunt Hazel wasn’t around to intervene, Kathleen and I got into a noisy argument about whose turn it was to do the dishes. Our fathers marched us into separate bedrooms to be whipped. We could hear Kathleen in the next room catching hell from her daddy. Mine whacked the pillow with his belt and whispered that I better not let on my whipping was fake or he would give me a real one. He was still smarting over the time Mother made him spank me. In All Roads Lead Home this incident plays out between Mary Catherine Bass and her son Junior.
Although nearly everybody in Daddy’s family used tobacco in one form or another, there was a strong Baptist bias against drinking. Daddy never saw Mother drink, but he saw enough else that for the rest of his life he wouldn’t speak her name. The aunts used to take me and Betty aside and ask about Doris. Was she still beautiful? Did she still have that long black hair? She was an object of fascination to both men and women.
Lubbock Manufacturing used to own its own fleet of Mack trucks, the trucks with a belligerent bulldog on the hood. I rode bobtail to the reunion once with Daddy and was made to see how his high perch above the other drivers made him feel like king of the road. When he wasn’t working, Daddy had no greater ambition than to lie on the couch and watch TV. He liked westerns, Bonanza and Gunsmoke, and western-themed movies and music shows, Grand Ole Opry and Hee-Haw. After his second wife Dorothy died, he never remarried. And after his heart attack, he traveled no further than his living room, where he lay under the air-conditioner with his shirt off watching countless hours of TNN. Insulated with a layer of blubber, Daddy claimed to have been cold only once in his life and that was delivering a transport to North Dakota in December. All eighteen tires froze to the ground and he had to start the diesel engine with a can of ether he carried for that purpose.
On the other side of Lubbock, Aunt Ruth ran a very different Glass household. Neighborhood children came to swim in a big tank of rainwater in the backyard. Cousin Buddy’s toy fox terrier Little Boy would grip a rag in his jaws while you whirled him around in circles. Aunt Ruth was a gifted amateur painter. She did a painting of Little Boy sitting on a rainy back porch. Buddy loved that picture, but it bothered him that Little Boy had to sit in the rain and he had Aunt Ruth paint a doghouse over him. One day Little Boy got sick or injured somehow and Buddy set off bravely and alone to shoot him.
Aunt Ruth was from Muleshoe, Texas, sixty miles northwest of Lubbock, which you’d think would have inured her to the dust and heat of the Texas panhandle, but she never got used to it. They had been out to Oregon to pick fruit when the kids were little and Aunt Ruth couldn’t get Oregon out of her mind. Over her kitchen sink she painted the scene she wished she was looking at while she washed the dishes, a pine-ringed lake. When Uncle Price retired, they sold out and moved to the Willamette Valley and Aunt Ruth began painting sunsets and rusted windmills.
In the evenings we gathered around the TV, which got better reception sitting on the windowsill. I didn’t care for boxing, brought to us by Gillette, but Daddy would nudge me to watch Aunt Ruth. She would get so wrapped up in the action she would start shadow boxing and punch the person sitting next to her. Her older son Billy played football and one night he was carrying the ball toward the goalpost when Aunt Ruth left the stands and sprinted down the sidelines with him.
For my sister’s eighth birthday, Aunt Ruth made a gorgeous three-layer cake, which for some reason she was having trouble cutting. She passed the cake to the next person who gave it a try and she couldn’t cut the cake either. Finally, the cake came back to Aunt Ruth who slipped the spatula between the layers and found a potholder frosted in place.
Kathleen had just picked me up from school one day when a sandstorm blew in. By the time we got home, it was so dark she had to turn on the headlights. With sand raging outside the house and everybody inside smoking, I was smothering. I wet a rag and laid it over my face. It felt like I had a sack of flour on my chest. After the storm, tumbleweeds were piled high against fences and the lee of houses. Over at Aunt Ruth’s house, I helped her rewash the dishes, even the good set of China wrapped in newspaper.
The first summer Daddy and I were in Lubbock, I stayed with Aunt Ruth’s married daughter Thelma, the first cousin to attend college, Texas Tech, as a business major. Thelma was married to a redhead named Norm Wilson, a Lubbock cop. Norm made his own bullets for target practice, melting chunks of lead in a little cauldron and pouring the molten liquid into a bullet mold. He let me help him.
On Norm’s day off he worked as a debt collector and we could hear him on the phone in the bedroom threatening people who didn’t pay their bills. Norm bragged about beating up Blacks and Mexicans in the backseat of his squad car on Saturday nights and Thelma would chide him and later divorce him. She was a lovely young woman, graceful and swan-necked, doe-eyed, another cousin for me to emulate.
The Wilsons didn’t own a television and after dinner Thelma would read to us from the collected stories of Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry. She gave me a book that I read over and over, Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie. One day Daddy found me crying over Little Britches by Ralph Moody, the part where the daddy dies. “Oh, honey,” he cried, rushing to comfort me. “It’s just a story.” Nobody in my family was surprised that I grew up to be a writer.
Daddy bought me a bicycle and I learned to ride on Lubbock’s long flat streets. One evening I lost track of time and forgot to come home for supper and Thelma had to drive around looking for me. We were going to the drive-in that evening to see Separate Tables with David Niven and Deborah Kerr. During the movie, Thelma got weepy, Norm thought it was boring, and I missed the point. Why didn’t anybody want to sit with the man?
Daddy’s favorite movie was Sergeant York with Gary Cooper. It was already a classic when it played that summer in Lubbock and Daddy took me to see it. Sergeant York is an excellent marksman because he used to shoot turkeys when he was a boy. He makes the call of a tom turkey and German soldiers raise their head to see what the weird noise is, and he picks them off. Kathleen and I went to the movies a lot, Elvis Presley in King Creole, monster movies, The Blob with Steve McQueen, The Walking Dead. I would get so scared I would have to wait for her in the lobby.
Mother was a movie fan, too, and the Cooper Theater in Antlers got all the latest films, and if they didn’t, we drove over to Clayton or Paris to see them. Mother subscribed to Photoplay and Modern Screen. Her favorite actresses were Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Hayward. In I Want to Live, the heroine goes to the gas chamber, a scene so vivid and horrifying we left the theater feeling that we had witnessed the death of someone we knew.
*****
When Daddy teamed up with Mary Limbo, he bought a modest two-bedroom house on East Rice Street in north Lubbock. My sister and I, so often separated, spent the summer of 1961 in that house. Mary was from Louisville, Kentucky, real name Limbaugh, though Mary used an alternate pronunciation for that and other words, including “extrasize.”
There were inconsistencies in the things Mary told us about herself, hinting at a past she wasn’t proud of. One of the Glass aunts known for speaking her mind, Aunt Betty most likely, said that Daddy met Mary Limbo at a truck stop where she was offering sex services. I doubt that. My father would never have bought sex. He said he felt sorry for little Kina who was a newborn when Betty and I met her and her mother the Christmas of 1959.
Mary Limbo was an unlikely femme fatale, a hundred pounds and perfectly proportioned, long brown hair and big brown eyes, crooked teeth. She chain-smoked, used atrocious grammar, and could yodel. We thought she was the most fun of any parent we ever had. Daddy was out of town during the week delivering transports which made Mary Limbo the adult in charge. She taught us to play canasta and we often stayed up all night playing cards. Kina knew how to get her own breakfast and we would find her in the morning sitting in front of the TV watching cartoons, eating cereal out of the box. She was tiny like her mother, with caramel colored hair and big brown eyes.
Mackenzie Park was not far from our house and Mary Limbo loved to take us there to ride the tilt-a-whirl and Ferris wheel. Sometimes there were all-night marathons of horror movies at the Red Raider for a dollar a carload. One time, Mary egged us into flirting with some boys in the car up ahead and I ended up getting asked out by a boy named Kenneth Cathcart.
Barely older than us, Mary Limbo had seen a lot more of the world, a certain segment of it anyway, though it was clear she had never been in charge of a household. One day she decided the wooden floors needed refinishing and she pestered Daddy into renting a sander and stripping them. With the wood laid bare, Mary sloshed several bottles of Old English Furniture Oil on them. The fumes were so strong we couldn’t sleep in the house that night and had anybody dropped a cigarette, the house would’ve exploded in flames. The smell gradually faded, but the floor never recovered.
When school started, my sister went back to Oklahoma and I stayed in Lubbock and enrolled at Tom S. Lubbock High School. Mary thought it was time to broaden my experience, and with Daddy out of town and Kina dropped off at the baby-sitter’s, we went clubbing. Technically, we weren’t cheating on Daddy, Mary explained, just not telling him everything we did. The character Noel in All Roads Lead Home is loosely based on Mary Limbo, although Mary would have objected to some of Noel’s behavior. Notwithstanding the above, Mary had a strong sense of propriety and wanted, above all, to be thought of as a lady.
Left over from her past, a past that included a stint as George Jones’s girlfriend—or so she claimed—was a collection of evening wear, gowns, heels, push-up bras, elbow-length gloves. That night she teased my hair into a beehive and studded it with sparklers, did my makeup, and took me to the NCO club at Reese Air Force Base. Our first job was to attract companions to buy our drinks. I don’t remember my guy’s name, only that he was a lot older than me and I had no wish to add him to my kiss list. With my Tom Collins half gone, Mary accompanied me to the ladies’ room and taught me how to “not get drunk.” A finger down the throat, an efficient heave, and then “You just go back and order another one.” Another piece of advice: “Always keep your own wheels.” Mary’s training served me well a few years later when I became an auxiliary member of a group of high-rollers.
Decked out in our finery one evening, Mary let me wear the George Jones ring, a black and a white pearl mounted side by side. The ring was too big for me, which meant it was too big for Mary, but she said you were supposed to wear it on the outside of your glove so people could see it. Of course, when I took the glove off, the ring disappeared.
Mary got Betty and me our first jobs at a nearby diner where she sometimes worked, Homer and Ella’s, washing dishes and peeling potatoes. When Homer and Ella weren’t around, Mary would let me work her station, believing she was training me for later employment. She taught me how to smile and joke with the customers, work for a bigger tip. She taught me to wear nurse’s shoes and look after my feet, to wash out my uniform at night and hang it over the shower curtain. Again, Mary’s training paid off. I worked my way through college waiting on tables, earning half my pay in tips. If not for restaurant jobs, I would’ve starved to death.
On Friday afternoons we went to Lubbock Manufacturing to pick up Daddy’s paycheck and take it to Piggly-Wiggly to cash. Then Mary made the rounds of department stores to put down a few dollars on each lay-away. She bought a piano for us to practice and matching fake leopard skin coats that kept me warm in college. Any money left over was for groceries.
My sister grew up and didn’t need me to look after her. She challenged my big sister supremacy and we fought epic battles that sometimes erupted into violence. One day our toddler sister became collateral damage. Betty had taken over the bathroom for what I considered an unreasonable length of time. I coached Kina to knock on the door and say she needed to go. Betty flung open the door and took the baby’s toenail off. We felt terrible about it, worse still after Mary Limbo got through with us.
After finishing my junior year of high school with Mrs. Jesson, I went to Lubbock and found Mary Limbo heavily involved with a new friend named Don. I got a strange vibe from Don. Was he a former client? Was he in love with Mary? Was he gay? Mary had questions about Don, too, and one night we staked out his apartment and watched him drive away with a woman. Didn’t that woman have gray hair, Mary demanded? She sounded jealous.
The next day while Don was at work, we investigated further, using a plastic card to jimmy the lock on the door to his apartment. Mary ransacked his closets and drawers looking for her George Jones ring. I had remembered taking off the gloves when we stopped by to have him admire us in our evening wear. Later, when I was back home in Oklahoma, Mary mailed me my purse, which had somehow come into her friend Don’s possession. It’s likely that rather than being a thief, the man was a cross-dresser.
Mary began pushing me to date, an effort I now see as an attempt to buy her own freedom. I went to the movies with Kenneth Cathcart and didn’t feel much interest in him or from him. He took me straight home afterwards but there was a strange car parked in front of our house and I didn’t want to go in and catch Mary Limbo with a man and be forced to lie to Daddy. We could hear loud music playing and a man came out on the porch, drunk, it seemed to me. I feigned interest in Kenneth Cathcart and then had to fight him off. He gave up in a huff and asked me why I had led him on if I didn’t mean it. I said, “There’s a strange man in the house with my stepmother. I can’t go in right now.”
And suddenly I wasn’t a girl he was trying to put the make on, but a human being with problems. We sat with me till morning, told me about the apprenticeship he was enrolled in, learning to make prosthetic limbs. It sounded revolting, but I admired him for having a plan, for figuring out so early in life what he wanted to do. The next day Mary pretended that her companion had been Don and that they had stayed up all night playing Canasta. “Why didn’t you come in?” she challenged.
Don redeemed himself by fixing me up with his barber, Mike Featherston, a guy who also had his future mapped out. Mike was a math major at Texas Tech and worked as a barber to pay for tuition. He cut Don’s extremely tidy blond hair every week. Mike was raised on a cotton farm outside of Petersburg, thirty miles northeast of Lubbock. Clean-cut, hard-working, good-looking, my entire family fell in love with him.
Our first date was three dates in one, progressively more disastrous. First, ice skating. After one awkward circuit, I knew it wasn’t for me. We left the ice rink and went bowling. I was even worse throwing bowling balls. Mike was determined to make a success of the evening and we ditched the ugly shoes and went to the drive-in to see Tobacco Road with Robert Mitchum. Surely I could enjoy a movie. Halfway through, I doubled over with cramps. I was too embarrassed to tell Mike what was wrong and would only say that I needed to go home.
Mike had cut many heads of hair to pay for that evening and didn’t get to enjoy any of it. He raced me across town. Was it appendicitis? Was I sure we shouldn’t go to the hospital? No, no, home, I insisted. He didn’t have sisters, so I’m not sure what he knew about girls and their monthlies. Mary Limbo gave me Anacin and put me to bed with the heating pad and sat Mike down at the kitchen table to educate him, a role she loved. After a while I got to feeling better and went out to the kitchen to join them. Had our first date gone according to plan, Mike might not have met Mary Limbo and Daddy, my two sisters, Betty and little Kina.
Mike took me home to meet his own parents and gave me a tour of the cotton fields. He showed me how water was pumped up from the aquifer into irrigation ditches that you had to open and close with dirt dikes. I didn’t know the water I saw coming out of the ground was once the ice of glaciers moving across North America, now seeing the light of day for the first time in millions of years, a finite resource pouring out of the ground to water cotton plants.
That summer I got a Dear Joan letter from Connie Smith, the sailor I had been writing to since my visit to California. His buddy had gone AWOL and left a wife and young child. He felt it was his Christian duty to marry her and provide for the child. I was happy for him. I had a real boyfriend now.
As summer wound down, Mike started asking me more about my life back in Oklahoma. I knew he was weighing the question of which household would be better for me. He had had the opportunity to spend time in Mary Limbo’s house, eating with us, playing Canasta all night. He was too polite to say he thought she was a bad influence. It’s likely, also, that he was thinking about what was good for him. He was impressed that my Oklahoma family was headed by Dr. Thomas Hawks, which had to be an improvement over a household headed by Mary Limbo. He couldn’t know how wrong he was.
I had one more year of high school and Mike urged me to go back to Oklahoma and finish school. I didn’t tell him that the last time I saw my mother we were locked in what could have been a fatal embrace with the Old Hickory between us. We didn’t promise to write or stay in touch. I packed my bags and caught the next bus home.
Mother was supposed to pick me up at the bus station in Paris but she wasn’t there. I gave up trying to reach her by phone and called last year’s boyfriend, Terry Pate. Terry didn’t sound very glad to hear from me but he agreed to come get me. He brought his father along. They drove me home and put me out with my suitcase without even cutting the engine. It was broad daylight and the house, as always, under construction, had the look I knew all too well. I carried my bags inside, went into my bedroom with the reinforced door, and latched myself in.
I had been gone only three months, yet everything felt different. Thomas was gone, for good, it seemed. Betty was all but living with her boyfriend Bruce Hammond. Last year’s best friend Becky Allen was planning her wedding. Juanita Snow was working part-time as a nurse’s aide. I was a senior now, Class of 1964. A committee worked on the yearbook. I wrote the class poem. We put on the class play and voted in Jim Coffman as president for life, a responsibility he has taken seriously ever since. I ran with Jim, the Smith twins, and Cathy Bartlett. We shared our booty, cigarettes, beer, and the occasional hard liquor or wine.
One night, Cathy Bartlett and I were in the backseat in a parked car, everybody sleepy from beer, the radio playing. I had my head in her lap and she was stroking my hair. I kept still so she wouldn’t stop. When will I meet a girl I love? I wondered. If that seems strange for a girl who had never known a queer in her life, never had any but heterosexual role models, I suppose it was. But identity is so fundamental, like the taste of your own spit, you don’t question it. I never said to myself, I’m gay. On the other hand, I never said to myself, I’m straight. You don’t have to do anything to be straight. Boys are just there. Always there. Years later, one of my high-rise tenants, an older woman recently divorced or widowed, asked me how she could meet men. I said, I have no idea. How do you not meet them?
My sophomore year in high school, I had drawn a cartoon for Thomas’s friend, Coop, editor of the Antlers American. I told him I wasn’t really an artist, that I would rather be writing, and he suggested a weekly column about school activities. My first column appeared in September 1962 and continued on a more or less weekly basis through March ’63. Unusual for Mother, she clipped them out every week and glued them into a magazine, which has somehow survived.
But I wasn’t really a columnist either and I got bored sticking to facts, writing about the stupid football game every week. Boys tried to explain the game to me, but I didn’t get the concept of “downs.” I was taking typing from Mrs. Jesson and Mother gave me a typewriter for Christmas that year. I typed my columns and outside essays for English class. In junior high, Mrs. Vaught had written on my essay, “Linda, you have a flair for writing.” A flair! I sent off stories to McCall’s and Redbook. My sister thought they were wonderful, especially the one about the old woman who dies and her cat eats her.
School photos were taken in the school cafeteria that doubled as an auditorium but senior pictures were taken in Johnny Hicks’ studio on High Street. I wore a sleeveless black velvet dress for my photo session and went to the beauty shop for a teased and frozen flip. Judging from the yearbook, all my friends went to the same stylist. There were fifty-eight of us in the Class of ’64 and it took a whole day to photograph us in eight different poses.
Seniors were given the day off to mill around downtown waiting our turn. Next door to Johnny Hicks’ Studio was Twomey Funeral Home (pronounced “Toomey.”) I wandered in and was surprised to find CJ working there as assistant and ambulance driver. We called him CJ, short for Camel Jockey. His real name was Gregory Lawrence Boswell. His stepfather worked for ARAMCO, the Saudi-American oil consortium, and his mother Ann had sent him to live with her folks the previous year so he could graduate from a real high school.
We had some history, Greg and me. The year before, I had pulled a sophomoric prank on him in the school cafeteria, dumped a pepper shaker down his shirt. I thought he was cute and wanted him to notice me. He later told me that he went home with his back on fire, but instead of getting mad, he asked me out. We only had one date and it ended in mutual embarrassment and later avoidance.
Now, a year more sophisticated, I looked around the funeral parlor as if shopping for a new casket. I knew I looked fabulous in my black velvet dress and perfect little flip. Greg said he lived in an apartment upstairs. Would I have dinner with him?
Greg was born in Oakland, California and raised by a single mother. He had never known his father and over the years had speculated who the man might be and why his mother refused to name him. Eventually Greg would decide that his own grandfather, Sidney Steelman, was his father and that his mother had fled to California to avoid the scandal. Now Ann was married to German-American “Gus” Gusman and had started a second family that would eventually grow to four, three girls and a boy. Greg saw his Arabian family every two years when they came home on leave.
Greg’s dating etiquette had improved since that awkward night he scared me off acting like a big stud. Eager to repair his image, he had gone all out, searing T-bones in an electric skillet, tossing a salad with thousand island dressing. I stayed the night and from that moment on began living a life separate from my mother. When Doris pulled one, Greg’s crummy apartment was my refuge.
On November 22nd, seniors were again excused from class to meet with a salesman from the Balfour class ring company. We were in the cafeteria being sized for our senior rings when Mr. Jones came over the PA system and told us the president had been shot in Dallas. Bewildered and shocked, we returned to our classrooms. A short while later Mr. Jones made the announcement that all Americans my generation and older remember with clarity and horror. Our beloved John Kennedy was dead. My family, like everybody else’s, gathered around the TV set for three days and watched the story unfold, the cortege, Jackie in a black veil, John-John saluting. It was the saddest thing we had ever experienced. Mother cried. We all did. Oklahoma was a blue state until Lyndon Johnson ran in his own right.
A few months earlier I had gone to Ardmore with Mother to buy a new car. She had gotten drunk and wrecked the Mercury and didn’t want anybody to know. (She broke her neck in a later collision.) That day we drove home in a sleek midnight-blue Pontiac Bonneville Grand Prix. It was the most beautiful car in town. Now, barely a month after JFK’s death, Mother insisted that I go with her one night on some mysterious errand. She wasn’t drunk and I had no reason to be afraid, yet I started getting nervous when she turned into Oddfellows Cemetery and parked the Grand Prix right next to the graves of my grandparents, almost the same spot where a year earlier Greg and I had abandoned our first date, the one that had gone so wrong we couldn’t face each other at school the next day. Did Mother know about that? Or was it merely her uncanny psychic ability, knowing things she couldn’t have known?
Doris had her ways. She stooped to snoop. She grilled our friends. She knew how to work my little sister for information. It didn’t embarrass Mother to pick up the extension and listen to our telephone conversations, read our mail, go through our drawers. If she couldn’t find proof of her suspicions, she was cynical enough to assume the worst and was usually right.
“You’re pregnant!” she announced, turning on the dome light and showing me the calendar where she tracked our periods, mine and Betty’s. My sister’s dates were all over the place. In fact, Betty had begun to suspect she would never have children. My body operated like celestial machinery, ovulating every 28 days. Or it did until November 1963.
My brain seized up. Doris was triumphant in having sussed out this world-shaking piece of intelligence, in being able to surprise me with it. Miss Better-Than-Everybody-Else, she mocked. Not so smart after all, are you, girl?
She was always accusing me of being too smart for my own good, of needing to be taken down a peg or two. I was stood up for a date once, some important rite-of-passage, junior prom maybe. Becky Allen and I had been double-dating and we started planning what we would wear, assuming the boys we were with would take us, a novice’s mistake. Donald Joe Talley could’ve spoken up and said that he had already asked Caroline to be his date, the girl he ended up marrying, but he didn’t say a word. The night of the prom, Becky and I talked excitedly on the phone. “They’re here, they’re here!” she said. I would be picked up next. I waited. I waited. I had a new dress and had gotten my hair done. How could it take so long to drive from Becky’s house to my house? “He’s not coming!” Mother cried. “You’ve been stood up!” Eventually I gave up and took off my new dress and went to bed, the humiliation more than I could bear. The next day Mother was conciliatory. She didn’t think for a minute he really wouldn’t come. But I knew her glee was genuine. She wanted me to fail, as only then would she have a role in my life.
She drove me home from the cemetery that night to another surprise. Greg was waiting for us. With Mother standing by, Greg said, “Linda, I understand we’re going to have a baby. I want to be that baby’s daddy.” He did not say that he loved me and wanted to be my husband. That would’ve been untrue.
I have a confused memory of the days and weeks that followed. While others made decisions about my future, I grappled with the appalling knowledge that something was growing inside my body. I didn’t want to be a mother. I didn’t want to get married. I was going to college. Daddy and Mary Limbo came to town. Mary brought one of her absurd outfits for me to get married in, or at least to get my picture taken, a white dress trimmed in rabbit fur. Greg and I sat for a wedding portrait that appeared in the Antlers American with the erroneous information that Dr. and Mrs. Hawks were happy to announce…
In Antlers, Oklahoma in 1963, admitting you were unmarried and pregnant was so shameful that girls and their families went to extraordinary lengths to hide the truth. I wasn’t the only girl in my class to get pregnant. One of my classmates was deserted by her sweetheart and ended up raising the baby on her own. Gregory Lawrence Boswell not only manned up to his contribution but relished the idea of becoming a parent, making his own family. I drank paregoric and secretly researched ways to rid my body of the invader. Legal abortion wouldn’t become available in Oklahoma, or anywhere else in the nation, for another ten years. My only options were to have an illegitimate baby or get married.
But the law didn’t make it easy. I was too young to get married without admitting to a judge that I was pregnant. At school, Mrs. Spear, my English teacher, took me to an empty classroom for a private chat. “Get married if you must, Linda,” she said, “but hold off getting pregnant. It will ruin your life.” I couldn’t meet her eye. My life was already ruined.
Wedding picture taken, Mary Limbo reclaimed her rabbit fur and she and Daddy went back to Lubbock. Greg and I carried on with our lives, unsure what to do next. One night that week I was with Greg at the funeral home when the ambulance was called to pick up a body and transport it back to Twomey’s. We drove an hour up into the mountains to what was now the Oklahoma Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Talihina, the hospital where I used to get chest X-rays. Greg drove around to the back and I stayed in the car while he loaded the body of an elderly man into the hearse.
It was late and we had missed our supper. Driving back through Talihina, Greg pulled into a hamburger joint and we went inside. From our booth, I could see the hearse parked outside with the poor old man lying inside. I’m sixteen and on a date with my boyfriend and a cadaver, I thought. On the way down the mountain, the gurney clattered and Greg worried the man would fall off. I worried he would join us in the front seat. Greg pulled over to the side of the road and climbed in back to tie the body down with his jacket. He drove me home before delivering the body to the mortuary. Mother was asleep but called out to make sure it was me coming in the house. “There’s a dead body in the front yard,” I told her. Mother cried out in alarm. Gotcha, Doris, I thought. She had a primitive fear of the dead.
The Methodist Church ladies gave us a wedding shower. Greg backed the hearse/ambulance up to the door of the fellowship hall and loaded up our haul. I felt so ashamed. I had sung in the choir for years with these ladies and now they were outfitting me for a role I didn’t want, housewife, with Noritake dinnerware, thick towels, sheets and pillowcases, lovelier things than in any of the households I had ever lived. Greg’s grandmother Ola Steelman gave us a blanket.
The last week of 1963, two months pregnant, I turned seventeen. If we didn’t decide something soon, there would be no hiding my condition. Mother was eager to get rid of us. She told Greg that he could have the Grand Prix if he would take me to Lubbock and marry me. And that’s what we finally did, got married at the Lubbock County courthouse with Daddy and Mary Limbo as witnesses. Mother rode the bus to Lubbock the next day and reclaimed the Grand Prix, leaving us on foot. I said to Greg, “Let that be a lesson. Never trust her.”
