“Yes. Yes. Yes!” I squeezed his knee. “Do you need it in writing?”
Terry
Friday, 6 November 1964, Glendale. A Marshall-Garretson wedding at last? After all that heartache over Annie’s devastating no the first weekend in September? How could that be?
No simple answer. We never had a single aha moment. I didn’t sink to one knee and propose, nor did Annie dissolve into tears and sob, Yes, of course I will, Ter, of course I will. Our touches didn’t, at some magical moment, ignite fireworks that lit up the future. She didn’t wake up in the middle of the night to a heavenly command: Now is the time. Marry that man! It wasn’t a bolt of lightning at all, but a thousand sparks artfully compressed into a mosaic of colorful memories like these:
Weekend tennis: I go to her place each Saturday morning at seven. She shoves aside a pile of student papers. We work up a sweat on the municipal tennis court, then splash in the Maryland Club Apartments’ modest pool. We eat lunch on her tiny backyard patio. And on rare occasions, our weekly hour-long tennis class turns into an all-day romp.
Dawn one Sunday: We drive eighteen miles to the famed Good-year Blimp’s winter quarters. The News-Herald’s ad manager has finagled a ride for the three of us. In unearthly silence, we float over lush cotton fields and citrus orchards framed by the stark desert of central Arizona.
A Saturday afternoon: I drop next week’s editorial on her kitchen table. “The idea’s good, but you don’t have to attack everyone in town,” she says. She splatters the draft with red marks. I dress the bloody wounds. Monday, the publisher reads it: “Great job, Marshall. Well put!”
Meals together: We dine at her place on a Thursday. Or a Monday. Or whenever. Annie concocts a quick meal—ground beef, slivered onions and potatoes, and I work up a fresh fruit salad. After dinner, she washes, and I dry. Then it’s back to grading papers or lesson planning for her and a night meeting and writing for me.
So what changed her mind?
She shrugged. “It was time. That’s all. With your best friend, you just know.”
Ann
Friday, Teachers Convention Day, November 6, 1964, Glendale. I hadn’t joined the Arizona Education Association, so I had the whole day off. I took a deep breath and spent the day writing and rewriting a couple of long-postponed letters.
First, to Mom and Dad.
Pages one and two: updates on my classes—vignettes of student antics, snippets from English lit, discipline woes, and life in the Maryland Club Apartments.
Pages three and four: I worked up the nerve to tell them I planned to marry Terry and I wanted their approval. I laid out my case. Extolled his virtues. No question, he was the one.
Page five: My clincher, “We don’t believe in long engagements.” This was one of Mom’s aphorisms: Long engagements breed too much familiarity (translation: premarital sex). I used her words to soften the shock of my next line. “We plan to get married over Christmas.”
Yikes. We had six weeks to pull off a wedding. I sealed the letter before I got cold feet.
Next letter: Break the news to Jack. Ironically, I had just received a “Dearest Ann” note with his “momentous” news—he had interviewed with the foreign service. The head of the panel told him they “needed his type.” I was delighted, both with their endorsement and with this positive hook I could use to start my letter. I hadn’t written since his “c’est la vie” letter. The tidal wave of lesson plans and papers to grade had swept away time to respond.
In his note, he apologized for not writing sooner and then hit me with “I rather thought you’d decided against communicating for some reason.” This new gibe stung as much as his quirky complaint of a year earlier about shooting the mail clerk and saving a bullet for himself—gentle but cutting rebukes of my own shortcomings as a letter writer. He said he’d visit me on his way to Vietnamese language training in California. He signed it, “Love.”
I couldn’t simply toss a breezy adios over my shoulder. Not to this man who had loved me without reservation, despite my erratic letter writing, the rivalry from Terry, his disappointments in our love life. He forgave my shortcomings, accepted my love without judgment, and even trusted me with his beloved Sting Ray.
He had also taught me more about the military than I had ever learned as an army brat. At the German-Czech border, he showed me what it meant to fight the Cold War, how essential it was to defend freedom with military might. And he gloried in the joy of living a cross-cultural life. He’d demonstrated that you didn’t have to hate a former enemy. He had never been an American soldier “occupying” Germany, but rather, a fellow human with shared goals who had steeped himself in German culture and language and become a better person because of it.
Peeling our lives apart was as painful for me as I imagined it was for him. “I’ll always love you,” I wrote, “but I know now I cannot be the next generation of my mom. My behavior in the Landshut social scene was contrary to the inner me. I’ll never be able to fill Mom’s spiky heels or wear red lipstick or laugh politely at the general’s ribald jokes.”
I reread my final draft, signed and sealed it.
Then I folded up and cried.
Terry
Saturday, 14 November 1964, Glendale. We set another pot of coffee to percolate and spread out our draft wedding invitation—a four-page mini-newspaper, Las Dos Animas (The Two Souls). News stories, headlines, an editorial, letters to the editor, classified ads, a full-page photo spread. No traditional invitation on pretentious stationery for us. No “Colonel and Mrs. Ralph Bonner Garretson Sr. request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter . . .” This wedding would capture the essence of our beings.
First, we banged out an editor’s note:
You may not believe it, but this newsletter is a wedding invitation.
In a way, we’re sorry we’re not sending fancy, engraved announcements. They generally bring friends by the score and loot by the ton. We like both. But our little newspaper is more in keeping with our personalities. We’re a little more informal than many.
Even if you aren’t getting the customary engraved note, we still want you to drop in on the ceremony if you’re in the area. (We don’t expect you to make a special trip for it.) Or you can drop in for a sandwich and a swig of booze (milk if you prefer) afterward.
In place of loot, though, why not drop an extra five-spot into United Fund or your church collection plate or send a check to the United Nations. Or you might send a book to someone in the Peace Corps. All we want is a card saying hello, with a word about what you have been thinking and doing. We have everything else we need.
Then my thoughts turned to the draft board. I whipped out a letter to the editor:
Dear Editor:
We recently heard the news. But it won’t work. We know as well as you do that your only reason for getting married is to avoid serving your country.
Enclosed is Form 339271803: “Order to File Real Reasons for Marriage, and to Report for Physical Exam, Induction Ceremony, Basic Training, and Shipment to Fort Misery.” Fill out in triplicate and return within three days. Remember, Uncle Sam will get you.
Fiendishly,
Your Local Draft Board
And it was on to the classified ads. We tossed out ideas like shiny beads, snapped up those with promise, and brought them to life on the typewriter:
For sale: One used copy How to Win Friends and Influence People. Carefully read, but ineffective. See at newsroom of Glendale News-Herald.
For sale: One slightly used copy Sex and the Single Girl. Mint condition. Make offer. A. Garretson. Box 00.1, Glendale.
For rent: Tiny, bug-infested studio cottage with one broken window and warped door. No heater. Faulty air conditioner. Close to barking dogs, railroad tracks, and 7-Eleven. Bring bug spray and apply at 7409 N. 61st Avenue. Late nights only.
We camped out at Annie’s kitchen table, ignoring the thunderheads of ungraded student papers and next week’s editorial commemorating the firs
t anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. After lunch, we laid aside silliness to explain to our friends—and ourselves—how our friendship had turned to love.
I recounted last summer’s climb up Kendall Peak where I “looked out at the world around me, the mile after mile of endless mountains, and asked, ‘Who are we, so small, to stand here?’” I described my “biting loneliness” while Annie traveled Europe. Then we wrapped up our newsletter-invitation with this summary:
We marry now to destroy that loneliness, yes, but also to share the mutual joy in a sunset, the common pride in a well-prepared classroom lecture, the common hopes and desires and ambitions, the common sorrows and disappointments.
We remain lost, for we have not yet found the answer to “Who are we to stand here?” that I had asked so often in Silverton. We still search for our answer—and many times, for the right questions. But in marriage, we search together. That should make the difference.
Late afternoon, Annie pushed back from the table. “Enough already. We’ve turned Saturday into another workday. We’re getting married. Let’s celebrate.”
We fixed cheese and crackers, opened her only bottle of wine—a Mateus rosé—pulled chairs onto the patio, and gloried in another dazzling Arizona sunset.
Though we had agreed to get married the day after Christmas, we hadn’t done anything about choosing a church. We were sitting there, sipping wine, when it became obvious. We’d get married at sunset, somewhere in the desert near Glendale. No church needed.
Over dinner and margaritas at La Cocina, we let our fancies roam free. We’d fly to Mexico City for a grand eight-day honeymoon. We’d stroll the Zócalo. Wander Chapultepec Park and explore the National Museum of Anthropology. Climb the pyramids at Teotihuacan. We’d search out the murals of José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. And we’d spend at least one night in Cuernavaca, the city of eternal spring.
The perfect end to a roller-coaster year, no?
21
Land Mines on the Road to Silverton
Terry
Monday, 16 November 1964, Glendale. Today, a shot over the bow from the draft board, short and to the point, dated November 12:
The information submitted does not warrant reopening your classification. Your Order to Report for Physical Examination mailed on October 26, 1964, to report on November 18, 1964, is still in effect.
Thursday, 19 November 1964. I didn’t report for the physical. I spent the day at the News-Herald, pounding out stories under deadline—and looking over my shoulder, half expecting the military police to storm the building and haul me off to jail.
Since my move to Glendale in August, when I sent the draft board my new address, a nasty premonition had been skittering through the recesses of my mind like a midnight scorpion. In October, it had morphed into a coyote, stalking me in the shadows. Now it was a diamondback, coiled beside my bed, poised to strike.
Ann
Wednesday, November 25, 1964, Glendale. I had looked forward to Thanksgiving for weeks. I needed a break from my daily planning-teaching-grading grind. Bonner flew into Phoenix from Washington, DC, to “keep me company” on my drive to Albuquerque. I hadn’t seen him since August. Having cleared the air on the Hofbräuhaus episode before I left Germany, we devoted the first two hours of our trip to Albuquerque that November day to happy brother-sister talk. Then he took the wheel and smoothly sailed the car through the twisty Salt River Canyon—and the conversation into an ambush. “Are you really going to marry that guy? What’s his name, the letter writer?”
“Yep, we decided it was time to get off the dime. Nice, huh?”
“He’s not right for you.”
“How would you know? You’ve never met him.” Under my calm exterior, my demons whipped up a blistering attack: Whoa, you’re the guy who knocked up Gretchen and threw her away. Who are you to counsel anyone on love? I didn’t say it.
Marrying Terry would besmirch our family honor, he said, our religion, our folks’ sacrifices for us, and the army. He extolled Jack’s qualities as if they were ribbons on a four-star general’s chest.
I countered with praise for Terry, our long friendship, his talent, and his values. I’d never won a debate with Bonner. He was too quick-witted, too articulate, too unflappable. But I couldn’t help thinking his arguments seemed too well-honed. Had our folks sent him to talk me out of marrying Terry? Or had he come on behalf of Jack? I tensed up. “We’re in love, Bonner. We’re getting married. End of discussion.”
“Yeah, if that’s how you feel, you should. But you shouldn’t have trashed Mom like that. That was nasty, Sis. Just plain nasty.” He spit the words like shrapnel.
“‘Trashed Mom’? What are you talking about?”
“‘I can’t be the next generation of my mom, wearing red lipstick, trying to fill her spiky heels,’” he whined in a snarky imitation of me. “Talk like that shouldn’t go outside the family.”
A prickly sweat crept up my neck. Those were my words—from my letter to Jack! Angry retorts boiled in my head. So where’d you get that little nugget, big brother? How dare you read my mail! And you, Jack: You showed him my letter? How could you?
Bonner had navigated the entire Salt River Canyon before I could squelch my internal invective. “Okay, let’s step back a bit,” I said at last. “This was my toughest decision ever. Jack will always be special to me—in more ways than you can possibly know.” Bonner may have read my mail, but he couldn’t read my mind! “I’m finally coming to terms with who I am. I’m not geared to be an army wife. As for Mom, defining my own path and becoming my own person is hardly ‘trashing’ her. They raised us to be independent. I’m affirming their success.”
That was the opening skirmish in a weekend of sorties. On Thanksgiving Day, Mom and I were talking about my job as we got dinner ready. Out of nowhere she said, “Annie, teachers need to be above reproach. You shouldn’t let Terry hang around your apartment so much. It doesn’t look good.”
“Jeez, Mom, where’d that come from?”
“Well, you are quite a catch. You can command the very best, so beware of getting indoctrinated by screwball ideas.”
I nearly dropped the casserole. “Mom, I love Terry. He loves me. We’re getting married. Please find some way to come to grips with that.”
I said it calmly, but it hurt us both. Her eyes welled up. Mine too. She turned away, busied herself with the salad. Minutes passed. She turned back. “Would you ask Ralph to set the table, honey? Tell him we’ll be ready in half an hour.”
That was it—truce by avoidance. We prodded and poked and implied this or that, but at the least sign of resistance, we retreated.
Thanksgiving dinner went off as if we were the Nelson family in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Stories about my classes, my students, Arizona’s glorious fall climate. Bonner’s new assignment at Fort Belvoir, his readjustment to life in the States, his new girlfriend. Jimmy’s prowess as a pole-vaulter, his classes at Sandia High. Mom’s and Dad’s joy in “finding a home” in a neighborhood church, Dad spearheading a drive to pave the church parking lot. We emptied two bottles of wine. Dad, Bonner, and Jimmy talked sports over the TV football games. Mom and I cleaned up, babbling as if we were still at the ranch and I was back in high school.
Friday evening, as I was fluffing my hair before we went out for dinner, Mom said, “How about a French roll? They’re so elegant. And you do attract men by your grooming.”
“Mom, I’m not trying to attract men. I’m engaged. Remember?”
“Yes, my darling, but may I add one more thing?”
I said nothing, steeling myself.
“Be sure this is really love. There has to be a real thrill for a marriage to work. A lively gift of gab, being buddy-buddy, and sharing the same likes and dislikes are important, but not as important as that all-consuming thrill that tells you this is the one.”
I fixed my eyes on hers, forcing her to look at me. “Know what, Mom? You’re rig
ht.” I wrapped my arms over my breasts in a tight self-hug, effected a sultry look, and gave a throaty whisper, “Let me tell you how he thrills me. How lovingly he can—”
She clapped her hands over her ears. “Oh, no, honey! Please, no!” She dropped into a silly knee-knocking Charleston dance—her way of apologizing. “Oh, Annie, I’m sorry. As the song goes, ‘Deary, please don’t be angry. It’s ’cause I’m lovin’ you.’”
Such a goofy look. I had to smile. “I know, Mom, but let’s call a cease-fire.”
Later, she pulled me aside. “Honey, if this is the man you really love, you have our blessings for all the happiness in the world. I do hope you’ll wait until summer, though, both to be really sure and to allow time to plan a proper wedding.”
Saturday morning, November 28, 1964, Albuquerque. I gripped the wheel of my Bel Air and limped out of town, my spirits bruised and aching. All my life, my family had been a bulwark of support. But the harder they pushed against Terry, the more I dug my heels in.
They hoped for a proper princess doll, forever at her well-heeled husband’s side—an army officer, a lawyer, a doctor, some high-paid professional. I wanted to be a free spirit. They wanted me to build my teaching career one gray concrete block on top of another. I wanted to join the Peace Corps and make the world a better place, initiating a future molded by travel and experiences I hadn’t yet imagined. They wanted me to embrace the conservative politics that permeated military life. During their campaign to tug me back into the fold, Mom had sent me A Choice Not an Echo, a right-wing tract promoting Goldwater for president. It pained me she thought such tripe worth reading.
But those were the least of my worries that blustery morning. As I began the descent into the Salt River Canyon, snow driven by howling wind obscured the hairpin turns—not a place or time to dwell on family jousts over my future. Then my radio sputtered out, so no friendly announcer to override my thoughts. Soon after, one by one, the heater, the defroster, and the wipers died. With what turned out to be a cold coming on, I began shivering and coughing. Suddenly, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. A flat tire! Where was Bonner when I needed him? By the time I dug out the jack and spare, my sneakers and thin jacket were soaked.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 36