But, as Pat and I had both discovered, fate has a way of intervening in our carefully laid-out plans. In college I fell in with the theater crowd and became consumed with the desire to become a playwright. My obsession with theater set my sights on a different path: Broadway! Just get me there and I could make it to the big time, I knew. I’d work backstage, doing whatever menial job was needed, until one of my plays became the toast of the town. I wanted it so badly that nothing could stop me (or so I thought), and I set out to make it happen.
My head was too far in the clouds to see the curveball headed my way. To finance a move to the Big Apple, my senior year I took a lucrative summer job as a cocktail waitress at a national park all the way across the country from Lower Alabama. (My parents didn’t know about the cocktail part of the job, nor did they know that I’d landed it by my willingness to dress as a miniskirted cowgirl and serve as the only female on a male-dominated bar staff.)
Away from everything familiar, I became a cliché of the worst kind, the wide-eyed country girl adrift in the big bad world, and I obligingly fell into every trap possible. To my astonishment, suddenly I became the most sought-after belle of the ball, Scarlett O’Hara at the Wilkes family barbecue. I’d landed in a place where my southern accent was considered enchanting and every word I uttered charming and delightful. For the first time in my sheltered, bookish little life, I had more attention than I could handle, and it went to my head. Prissing around in boots and short skirts, I tossed my long blond hair and flirted shamelessly with besotted customers to get big tips. Why hadn’t I realized before how much fun femme fatales have? I went out with a different guy every night: park rangers, jazz musicians, frat boys, international students from exotic lands. One night a couple of cowboys got into a fistfight because I couldn’t remember which one I’d promised to dance with.
Despite all the exhilarating attention, I went for the unattainable and had a forbidden love affair with a college boy who had a fiancée waiting in the wings. When that heady summer came to an end, I’d tucked away a nice savings account and was eager to start my exciting new life. Which I did; just not the one I’d envisioned. My sins had found me out, just as my mama always said they would. I came home pregnant. Morning sickness and a reluctant call to a faraway college boy changed everything, and my life turned completely upside down. My dreams of Broadway gave way to the harsh reality of bottles and bassinets.
Fresh out of college, I became a single mom with a baby boy to support. In one wild summer, life had thrown me for a loop, and I struggled to get my equilibrium back. The Great White Way wasn’t going anywhere, I reminded myself; all I had to do was put my dreams on hold. Once before I’d done what it took to start a new life, and I could do it again. This time, I’d be smarter, see the curveball coming. And I’d lower my sights. I didn’t have to go to Broadway to write plays; I could start out with community theater and work my way to the top. It was a new era where women could have a home and career. I’d fallen in love with my beautiful baby, which had made me see that I wanted a close-knit family too, like the one I’d come from. Why settle for anything less when I could have it all?
The opportunity for a new life presented itself in a most unexpected way. An old college friend whom I’d corresponded with while he was in the Peace Corps had returned from Africa and called me as soon as he got home. Could he come for a visit? He couldn’t wait to see me and the adorable little one. Now a theology student in Atlanta, my friend was ready to settle down. It was only later, looking back, that I realized he’d been in the market for a ready-made family by the time he crossed my threshold. A cute young preacher was nothing but trouble for a congregation, which churches avoid by insisting on a family man. Yet again, fate was throwing another curveball my way, and I was as unprepared as before. To my great surprise, my old buddy and I soon fell in love and began planning to spend the rest of our lives together.
If my mother was pleased when the preacher man and I got engaged, she was over the moon when we married, settled into parsonage life, and had our first child a year later. Praise be to God for hearing a mother’s prayers! Her wayward daughter had finally given up her silly notions of becoming a writer and all that other foolishness. It had been a rough road to redemption, but surely now the prodigal daughter could see that a woman’s place was in the home, just as the Lord intended, and my mother had known all along.
For a while, God was in his kingdom and all was right with the world. Once I settled into being a preacher’s wife, I discovered it was a role I was made to play. In the same way some girls are educated and trained to be corporate wives for husbands-to-be, I had been groomed by the formidable church ladies of my life—my mother, grandmother, and aunts—to be the helpmate of a preacher. Plus, forsaking my old ways and becoming a new person came with an unexpected payoff: everyone—especially my husband—liked the new me more than the old one. It was a heady feeling. The wayward, restless daughter with her head in the clouds was now a changed person, the one God had made her to be. She had become the ideal little wife, mother, and helpmate.
And on the surface, it was a good life. I flung myself into it and tried hard to make amends. My sinful days were over, and my halo fit me better than the hoop skirt had. The preacher man and I had our last child—another boy—and I became an officer in the Preachers’ Wives Club. (Yes, there really was such an organization in the late ’70s. Although I knew a couple of female pastors, I guess their spouses didn’t count.) As long as I stayed too busy to question how I’d ended up leading a life so different from what I’d planned, all was well.
Beneath the surface was a different story. During those seemingly joy-filled years, I was haunted by a recurring and terrifying nightmare in which a black cloth was placed over my face, and I couldn’t breathe until I fought it off. Talk about a metaphor! Years later I saw my first burka and felt a cold chill of recognition. I knew I was losing my identity, lost in the role I was playing, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Somewhere along the way I became a cauldron of doubt and depression. Although I hid my true feelings, inside I was filled with guilt and self-loathing. If life was so good, then why the hell was I so miserable? During what should’ve been the best years of my life, I was functioning on autopilot, so severely depressed I often entertained myself with elaborate plans of suicide. For the first time ever, I was plagued by health problems and hospitalized a couple of times for heart arrhythmias that left me shaken and scared. Though I don’t know what I was scared of; if the heart problem had taken me out, I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time trying to figure out the best way to do it myself.
The biggest strain for me during this time was not the health issues and the suicidal depression, though; it was what had plagued me ever since I took on my new role. What would people think if they knew how crazy I was? Fighting depression was nothing compared to the effort I put into keeping up a good front. I’d been doing it for so many years that I wasn’t about to give it up. If I ever succeeded in offing myself, it’d take the undertaker all day to get the smile off my face, it’d become so much a part of my fake persona. The poor preacher’s wife had died tragically and much too young, but hadn’t she been a cheerful little thing?
I didn’t know at what point I’d lost myself. What had become of the girl I used to be, the dreamy one who wanted to be a writer, who filled her life with books and stories? She’d lived in her own little world, a place where she created her own characters, wrote her dramas and books. I’d taken the little girl I used to be off to college with me because she’d been so eager to learn, to sit at the feet of writers who’d achieved what she wanted more than anything in the world. She even talked me into believing I could be a playwright, for God’s sake! Because of her, I’d been determined not to settle for dull and boring but to lead a fulfilling life of creativity and adventure. Where had she gone?
Who can say what happens to the dreams of our younger selves? I know I’m not the first woman of my generation to put hers a
side for another life, even the kind of life I’d sworn to never lead. I came of age during the awakening of the women’s movement, when we believed we could have it all. And maybe we could have, and maybe some of us did. I thought I could too, at first. I thought I could work side by side with my husband, who had his own radical and exciting dreams, to make a difference in the world. We would raise our children differently from the way we were raised. They’d come up in a free and creative environment, with a diversity of people and ideas that we never had in our stifling southern upbringings. While the preacher was bringing the liberating word of God to his congregations, I’d work my miracles with words. He’d preach sermons, and I’d create pageants and programs and books that would transform the lives of others. Together, we could do it.
Only, it didn’t happen that way. As it turned out, it was our lives that were changed, his and mine, and not for the best. Now in a position where we were dependent on the goodwill of those who’d placed us there, we caved. If the sermons became too fiery or hit too close to home, an ambitious young preacher would find himself put out to pasture, serving a church in the boondocks no one else wanted. God forbid the preacher’s wife offends someone by speaking her mind or not going along with the status quo! It was up to the preacher to keep an errant spouse in line. I learned many things during my tenure as a preacher’s wife. One of which was what my mama had been trying to tell me all my stubborn, rebellious life. To make it in this world, to get what you want from it, you have to toe the line. Swimming against the current, blazing your own trail, leads to nothing but misery and discontent. I had everything in life a woman needed. Why wasn’t it enough?
It eroded over time, of course, as those kinds of soul-searing things always will. Sometime during this period, I not only lost myself, I lost God as well. At different points in my life, I’d toyed with Buddhism and Hinduism but eventually found more meaning in the comfortable fit of the familiar, the timeless rituals of a community of believers. But even that lost meaning as the image became more important than the imagery. It no longer mattered to me what I believed. The only thing that mattered was making sure no one suspected how lost I was, how empty inside. The persona I’d created to cover up my true self had become the only me I knew anymore. A spiritual connection wasn’t possible because there was nothing inside me to connect with.
Looking back, I’m not sure I can identify the turning point, the exact moment I knew I could no longer be the me I’d become, the depressed, suicidal person who clung so stubbornly to a self-image that was becoming less valid every day. I do know that for any new life to burst into bloom, something has to die out. I had to rid myself of the phony nonperson I’d created to please others. And I did it the only way I knew, with the only resource that has ever given my inner life any real meaning. I closed the door and started to write. This time, I wasn’t writing devotionals or mission studies or Christmas pageants; I was writing my way out of a life that had stifled and imprisoned me. I wrote about my despair, my desperation, my lost identity. Word by word, I sought to reconnect with myself. No longer did I write to please or impress others—on the contrary, I had no intention of sharing what I wrote with anyone. I hid away and wrote feverishly, disconnected from everyone and everything. Alarmed, the preacher man demanded I get back to my church work, back to him, back to my family. The congregation had noticed and were talking about me. At one time, I would’ve meekly put away my silly little writings and put my false face back on.
But this time I couldn’t do it anymore. Instead I stayed put and wrote about a woman’s struggles to fit into the mold she’d created to please others. The playwright had written a make-believe role, then stepped in to fill it herself. God hadn’t cursed her and caused her to lose her voice; she had cursed herself by denying her voice. Freely and willingly, she had given it away. I had given it away. My marriage began to fall apart, but my novel was taking shape.
Little did I know at the time, but during that feverish, stumbling journey of self-discovery, I was creating the underlying themes of all the books I’d write from that point onward. The loss of self, the search for identity, and the ultimate redemption through art would become the foundation for the stories I’d tell, over and over. Through writing, I finally was freed of that prison of my own creation, the deadly urge to please others, to let what others think of me become more important than what I think of myself.
In the end, however, the strain proved to be too much for me, and when my marriage ended, I put the book aside. Once I’d started writing again I couldn’t stop, but I could move on to easier subjects. As I’d told Pat, I couldn’t bear to revisit my former life and that’s where the rodeo rider came in. But Pat had sensed what I knew with all my heart but had been running from for years: I had a story to tell, and it wasn’t about riding the rodeo. It was about a woman like myself, who struggled to find her identity apart from the demands of others. Whether or not I could find the courage to tell it was a question only I could answer.
* * *
Back in my writing room with a view of the lagoon where white egrets nested, I returned to the unfinished manuscript that had both haunted and eluded me for years. For the months that followed, I worked on it like a person possessed, which I suppose I was. When it was finished, I called it The Sunday Wife and hurriedly mailed it to my brand-new agent before I could change my mind.
Somehow it seems fitting that I’d met my new agent in the most unlikely of places, the funeral of the Great Santini. It was the first time I met a lot of Pat’s friends in publishing, but most of the day remains a blur, as usually happens with funerals. A longtime colleague of Pat’s at Doubleday, Marly Rusoff, took me aside to say that she’d heard about Making Waves and would love to read it. I gave her a copy but didn’t think anything about it until she called me a few days later. She’d liked the book and was calling to see if I was represented by an agent. After years in the publishing business—at one point she’d been Pat’s publicist—she was starting her own agency and wondered if I was interested. Since I hadn’t gotten around to renewing the contract with my current agent, I signed on with Marly instead. It turned out to be a great decision. Not only did she sell my second novel at auction, she also sold the rights to reissue Making Waves, which has gone through several printings since its modest beginning.
In an unforgettable juxtaposition of horror and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, Pat and I flew to New York exactly one month after 9/11, where I signed the contract Marly had negotiated with Hyperion for The Sunday Wife, scheduled to come out the following year. Our trip was bittersweet. The horrific smell of destruction lingered in the air, and the faces on the street were dark and glum. Pat visited Ground Zero, but I couldn’t bear to and went for a walk uptown instead. It was a beautifully bright and crisp October day, and I searched for signs of the recovery that brave city was in the midst of.
On the way back to the hotel, my stroll was halted near St. Jean Baptiste, where a crowd filled the sidewalk. So many flashing firetrucks blocked the street that I feared there was a fire in the historic church and began backing away. It was then that I spotted the honor guard of firefighters clearing the way for a flag-draped casket to be carried into the church. When I heard someone in the crowd say that the body of one of the firefighters buried in the wreckage of the twin towers had been recovered a few days before, I fell apart. With tears pouring down my cheeks, I turned and ran back to the hotel, making my way blindly through the crowded streets.
Pat returned from his trip to Ground Zero, grim-faced and somber, to find me huddled on the bed and staring out the window. He sat beside me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Baby? You okay?” he asked, and I shook my head.
“No. I want to go home,” I told him.
“So do I, but you’ve got a meeting with your new publisher.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to go.”
“Why not?”
I leaned into him. “Being here now. It breaks my heart.”
> Pat pulled me close and said something I would hear him say many times in the years to come. “I never expected life to be so tragic, did you? I mean, I knew it’d be hard, but sad? I don’t know how any of us do it.”
On the flight home, Pat had the window seat, and I leaned over him to say goodbye to the wounded city. At the sight of a skyline where two towers had once stood tall and proud, Pat grimaced and turned his head away. I grasped his hand but made myself look until the plane dipped and only blue sky remained. It will rise from the ashes, I whispered to myself as a sort of benediction, like we all must do.
As I settled back into my seat, it occurred to me that I too had risen from the burnt-out remains of my former life. At one point I’d lost my sense of self, my faith, and my dreams of becoming a writer, and I hadn’t been sure if I could ever find my way back. But slowly, surely, I had begun to spread my wings.
Chapter 8
In the Family Way
One of the first things I did as Pat’s new wife was write a letter to his daughters Jessica, Melissa, and Megan to tell them that Pat and I were no longer living in sin, and that I promised to take good care of their “maddening, crazy, irascible but lovable” father. Because of the situation between Pat and his youngest daughter, Susannah, I wrote her a separate letter. I introduced myself as the wicked stepmother, said I looked forward to meeting her, and invited her to come to Fripp for a visit. Since no specific visitations had been set up by the court, California’s laws about teens being different from those in most states, I wanted to let her know she’d be welcome to stay as long as she liked.
I didn’t tell Pat I’d written Susannah until I got a reply, not wanting to get his hopes up. Susannah accepted the invitation graciously and made her plans to come. In her reply she acknowledged that her relationship with her father had been troubled since the divorce, but she wanted to see him. She was turning seventeen that year, not the easiest of ages (are any of them?), but I don’t recall any qualms about having a possibly moody teenaged girl in the house. I’d raised only boys, who popped each other with wet towels, told fart jokes, and got into food fights. Moody, I could handle.
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