A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  My health card for Little Miss Little Rock.

  (In my defense, there was a category on the card marked “genitalia,” for which I got a “normal.” If indeed some strange doctor was examining my genitals, it’s no wonder I pitched a fit and earned a “poor” rating in deportment. Examining a little girl’s genitals should have been outlawed, but it was 1952 and nobody thought anything about things like that in those days. If it was a doctor doing it, it must have been all right.)

  Me, the year I won Little Miss Little Rock.

  My mother had a great time getting me all dolled up in a yellow chiffon dress with rhinestones, white patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and socks with ruffles. The mistress of ceremonies, a former beauty queen in a purple evening dress, handed me the golden trophy and put the crown on my head, and when the audience clapped and cheered, I loved it so much that I wouldn’t leave the stage. The woman in the purple dress tried to take my hand to lead me off, but I ran from her, and let me tell you, it was hard work for her to catch me in those high heels. The audience went crazy. I still have the trophy, my only beauty contest win. That gave me a taste for the spotlight, and my daddy, red-faced with embarrassment, had to drag me off the stage at church because I climbed up there to mimic the preacher. I liked the way he waved his hands around, and I wanted to get up and wave mine, too. I deservedly got my bottom tanned a few times when I was little.

  A lot of memories of my third year of life are as clear as glass. My daddy worked nights, and my mother, always nervous and delicate, was terrified of staying home alone with me. She was afraid I was going to get hurt, or some man was going to kidnap me, and I unfortunately thought it was a fun game to hide from her, or to run off in department stores. Once, in Woolworth’s, I was riding up and down the escalator when she found me talking to a drunk man who was trying to get me to go home with him.

  Things got worse for my mother after my fingers were smashed. I was playing in the yard with my toy cooking set when the dough roller somehow rolled off the sidewalk into the sewer. My father, who was at home during the days, lifted the manhole cover and climbed down to rescue it, and I had my hands on the edge of the hole, peering in, when the iron cover slipped and crushed my two left middle fingers. My mother, who was hanging out wash, heard my shrieks and came running. She wrapped my bloody hand in a white organdy pinafore she was holding, and we rushed to the doctor, who bandaged them up and told us babies didn’t have bones in their fingers, only gristle, so they didn’t need to be set. Those fingers have served their purpose all my life, although they are a bit crooked and the nails a little weird.

  At any rate, I think the last straw for my mother was when I escaped from home, standing on the back of a little neighbor boy’s red tricycle, holding tight to his shoulders like a pint-size Ann-Margret on Elvis’s Harley, red curls bobbing in the wind. I can still remember the thrill of freedom as we rode, he pedaling as fast as he could, taking me down the block to play with another friend. When I came back, I was surprised to find my mother out in the yard, screaming my name and crying, and soon after that we moved back to Atkins, out in the country near Gum Log. She just couldn’t take city life anymore.

  This next part is vague for me in its details. It’s something that has been carefully hidden over the years, and I’m hesitant to talk about it even now, but I think it is probably central to my life in ways I can only half comprehend. After this last episode, before we moved to Atkins, my mother went into the hospital and got shock treatments. I remember it only through my three-year-old sensibilities, and I, of course, wasn’t told where she was, but I believed it was my fault, that I had done something so bad that I’d made her go away. I stayed with my aunt Ella Belle and cousins Carla and Billy Darel while she was gone, I don’t know how long, as time doesn’t mean much to a three-year-old.

  I do remember it was summer and we were out in the yard in our underwear playing with the water hose when a strange new brown and tan car drove up. I couldn’t see who was in it. A woman I didn’t recognize got out and held out her arms to me, but I was frightened and didn’t run to her. It was my mother. She looked different; maybe she had a new haircut. After a moment I realized who she was, but how painful it must have been for her to come home from Lord knows what kind of brutal situation and find that her daughter didn’t remember her.

  I didn’t learn until I was a teenager what had happened; even to this day at age ninety she won’t talk about it, but all her life my mother would go into depressions and rages. I know she loved me more than anything in the world, and I loved her, but we never understood each other. It was hard for us to talk.

  One night when I was about seventeen, I was in the car with my future first husband and some friends on our way to a party on Petit Jean Mountain. It started to snow, and my mother had a premonition we were going to get killed in a car wreck. She sent my father to chase down the car and bring me home. Of course I was humiliated and so angry at her. It was then, in the car on the way home, that my father told me the story of her breakdown and asked me to be tolerant of her. Since then, I have always felt guilty about my mother, rational or not, and have believed that my being the feisty child that I was caused her to snap.

  Moving back to Atkins was much better for her. We were in the country, and since she couldn’t drive, it was just the two of us in the house all day long. (My father taught me to drive when I was eight; I would sit on his lap and steer. Then, later, I sat on a cushion until my legs could reach the pedals. By the time I was twelve, I was driving my mother everywhere, hoping I wouldn’t get stopped by a cop.) I would keep her company while she gardened or ironed or cooked, and she read to me until I memorized all my Little Golden Books and pretended to read them myself. Then one day when I was about five, I realized I could read them.

  We watched The Mickey Mouse Club together and made chocolate chip cookies and played with Pickles the cat, who had babies as fast as she could, feral cats who lived wild under the house. One day Pickles disappeared, along with the gang of offspring, and when I asked where she was, I was told she had run away. Along with all her children. I didn’t find out until much later that my uncle George had come and taken them all off, he would never say where. I chose to believe they were adopted by a kind family who needed twenty-two cats and fed them cream every day. I’ve always been an optimist.

  Gaynell, me, and Pickles the cat on the porch of our house in the country.

  I think life in those days was good for Mother for the most part, and for me, too. My father still worked in Little Rock, which meant he had to get up early in the morning for the hour-and-a-half commute. I guess we were poor—well, no guessing about it. Although we had cold water from a pump at the kitchen sink, we didn’t have hot running water in the house or an indoor toilet. (We did use toilet paper in the outhouse, however. My daddy used to tell me that when he was a boy on the farm, they used corncobs, red ones and white ones. You used a red one first, then you used a white one to see if you needed to use another red one.) But a lot of people didn’t have running water or indoor bathrooms, like my grandparents in the Dardanelle cotton fields. My grandma cooked on a wood burning stove like her mother and grandmother had, and like us, they used coal for heat in a black potbellied stove in the living room. Our bedrooms were icy in winter, and the only way anybody could sleep was to be nestled in a feather bed, weighed down under a big stack of quilts my grandma had made, so heavy it was a chore to turn over.

  My grandparents raised or grew everything they ate, made their own soap from rendered fat and wood ashes, and sewed some of their clothes from flour sacks, which were lovely soft cotton prints, designed by the flour companies in fifty- or hundred-pound bags for just that purpose. I still have baby clothes my grandmother made for me from flour sacks, and my own granddaughter wore them.

  The infamous year I was three, we went to Grandma’s house for Sunday dinner, as we often did, and I went out in the yard to watch her chase a chicken down and wring its neck. Then she sat wit
h it between her knees, plucked off the feathers, cleaned it, and threw the insides into a bucket she gave to the hogs. Finally, she chopped off the feet and tossed them to me, saying, “Here, baby, you can play and make tracks in the dirt with these.” I looked at those yellow disembodied feet lying there—I was still in shock from seeing the pigs chowing down on the entrails—and got sick and threw up. I didn’t eat any chicken that day, and never touched meat of any kind again until I was around fourteen and started to date. All the kids made fun of me for ordering a hamburger without the meat. (In grade school, they liked the fact I didn’t eat meat; somebody was always vying to sit next to me in the lunchroom to ask for mine, so I was popular.) After I learned to eat hamburger, all was lost. That led to hot dogs, then chicken, then bacon and everything else.

  By the time I was in first grade, riding the big yellow bus every day, my parents decided they wanted to move to town so I could walk to school and have an easier life, so my father took out a loan and built a house two blocks from school with an indoor bathroom. Besides the wonder of the flush toilet and being able to take a hot bath without having to heat the water on the stove, we had a floor furnace. I used to stand on the furnace and let the hot air blow my skirts up, like Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate, while my bottom burned, toasty and warm. The whole house was warm, not just the spot right in front of the coal stove. And I became one of the town children. That made a big difference in my social life. I could ride my bike to visit my friends and play with the other kids on the block, running from yard to yard flying kites or playing tag or chasing lightning bugs, all the moms watching after us from their kitchen windows, until it got dark and they called us in to supper.

  There was one dark cloud in this idyllic time. My father was working on a job building a paper mill near Atkins, and he was standing underneath a huge iron slab, directing it into place, when the chains broke and the slab fell on him, crushing his feet. It was a miracle he wasn’t killed. I was in the first grade in the little white building that housed the first two grades, when Carla, my older cousin (by only two months, but a grade ahead of me) came with a teacher who took me out of class. The teacher told me my father was in the hospital and someone would come and get me. I was scared, but Carla sat with me on the steps, her arm around me, until my aunt could pick me up. It was the most terrifying thing, to see my handsome, big strong daddy lying there in the hospital bed, his feet all bandaged. He never complained, no matter how much pain he was in, and tried to make like it was nothing, but I’m sure he was frightened.

  We had just built a new house, and he would be out of work for several months. I was too young to understand what that meant, but until he could walk again and go back to work, we had little money. I remember him once telling my mother all we had left was twenty-five dollars. We borrowed some, I think, and his cousin Check gave us credit at the grocery store, but for a while we weren’t sure if my father was ever going to be able to walk, much less work again. I remember my mother trying to help him get in and out of bed into his wheelchair, he in his maroon bathrobe and blue pajamas, but he never let on to me that he was afraid. He had a lot of major illnesses in his life and was always stoic through them all, joking and laughing when I know he must have been in tremendous pain. I have tried to emulate him in my own life, sometimes succeeding, more often failing, but it is something I always remember.

  When he was able to walk again, we went to the offices of the company where he worked, hoping to get a settlement, but all they offered him was two thousand dollars, less than his salary would have been for the same period, and he took it without question. They knew we had no money for a lawyer. He walked with a limp from then on, and couldn’t run or play ball with me. His feet hurt him all the time, and over the years he had to have several operations on them, almost losing one of his feet once. The paper mill, of course, was built without him and proceeded to stink up the environment with its chemicals, and decimate all the trees in the area. And I’m quite sure the owners, if they even knew, must have congratulated themselves for saving a few thousand dollars by cheating a good man out of the money that should have come to him for their wrecking his life.

  Three

  While Mother and Daddy were living in Washington and I was just an infant, some friends of my father’s went out one night, I never knew to do what, and got killed in a car wreck. There was alcohol involved, but my parents never told me anything about it. I only heard bits of adult conversation later, but the way my mother always said the word, “Drinking,” let me know it was something really bad. My daddy was supposed to go with them that night, but for some reason he decided not to. He was never a big drinker, but he would occasionally have a beer or two, and once in a while he got drunk. This near miss made him totally give it up, get saved, and join the church.

  I was carried, a baby in arms, to the Freewill Baptist Church and was taught religion almost before I learned to talk. In those days, along with school, churches were the center of social life in small-town America, and for the most part it was a sweet life. Besides the three-times-a-week services, there were revivals and singings, dinner-on-the-ground picnics and summer ice cream suppers under somebody’s big shade trees, vacation Bible school, and teenage get-togethers. There was summer camp, where we slept in low concrete-block dormitories (with a lot of spiders) and where we went to church several times a day in a tabernacle with sawdust floors and open sides. We played softball and Ping-Pong and did arts and crafts as well (wearing dresses, since shorts and pants for girls were not allowed). One activity I liked was Bible drill. We kids would line up shoulder to shoulder, and a teacher facing us would say, “Attention! Salute! Draw Swords!” (swords were our Bibles—the old Christian solider metaphor) and then give us a Bible verse. The first one to find it would take a step forward and get to read it. The winner at the end of camp would get an official Freewill Baptist Bible drill Bible, which I still have.

  The preachers were the rock stars of the churches, and their sermons were showtime. Each preacher had his own style. Some spoke in a loud singsong cadence, pounded the pulpit, jumped on and off the stage, shook their fists, and perspired so profusely that the first row of the audience would be sprinkled by sweat. Some preachers were quieter, speaking sincerely to the heart, while others were a combination. Just as your mind started to drift off, the quiet preacher would suddenly shout and wake you up. The goal was for the preachers to move their congregations emotionally, and to see how many people would come up to the altar and be saved and join the church.

  Another way to do that, for some preachers, was to scare the flock into being saved by describing what would happen if someone committed a sin and died unforgiven and unsaved. If you had even one sin on your soul when you died, they preached, you would go to hell, and it seemed like nearly everything was a sin. Drinking alcohol, of course—that was one of the worst ones—or dancing or anything sexual outside holy matrimony. (There was an old joke: Why won’t Baptists make love standing up? Because someone might think they were dancing.) Going to movies was a sin. Gambling and playing cards, even if you weren’t doing it for money, was a sin (the appearance of gambling was enough). Going fishing on Sunday, or doing anything fun or worldly on Sunday instead of going to church, was a sin. Swearing was out, of course—even something called wooden swearing, which was saying “darn” in place of “damn,” or “heck” instead of “hell.” My father once spanked me for saying “pooey,” but it was probably the ugly way I said it, not the word itself that got me into trouble. I never heard Daddy swear even once, wooden or otherwise. When he was exasperated, sometimes he would say “Oh, me.” (I guess you can’t blaspheme yourself.) If my mother was feeling really angry, she would say “Oh, the devil,” which my father wasn’t happy about. (I never said the word “fuck” out loud until I met Norman. How’s that for irony? Something in him just brought it out in me, I guess. I still have trouble swearing, and for the most part don’t.)

  Our church frowned on wearing shor
ts or spaghetti strap dresses or anything that showed too much skin. Although I was allowed to wear a bathing suit to the public pool, some of the church members wouldn’t let their daughters wear them. So on the hot summer Sundays when I went home with one of the girls from church after service, if we went swimming in the creek, we had to wear old dresses, which got tangled around our legs and made it hard to kick. I was never much of a swimmer. My mother’s fear of water, if not her other fears, transferred down to me. When she was a kid, her older sister and two friends were wading in the Arkansas River on a sandbar when they fell into a sinkhole, and the two friends drowned. My aunt Modene nearly drowned, too, and later she developed TB and died when she was twenty-seven, probably from ingesting that nasty river water.

  When I was about eight, we got a preacher named Brother Tommy whose favorite thing was to preach about hell. “Tonight we’re going to talk about… HELL,” he would intone, his eyes smoking with brimstone under shaggy white eyebrows. At that time there was no such thing as children’s church, and the kids were expected to sit quietly with the grown-ups for the whole service. For a little girl, it was terrifying. I would be as small as possible on the bench, cold and still, wishing I could get up and go out, while he preached for an hour and more about the devil with horns and cloven feet, the burning flesh and pools of liquid fire, on and on and on. He really got off on the details of what the devil was going to do to us. “No man knows when the world is going to end,” he’d say, “but, brothers, it’s coming, and it’s coming soon. It might be tomorrow… or it might be tonight…at the midnight hour. The clock will chime, the moon will turn to blood, and the sky will roll away to reveal the Lord Jesus, riding on clouds of glory, coming down to take His own with Him to heaven, and all the sinners will be left behind to BURN… forever and ever, with no hope of redemption, in HELL… where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not.” Brother Tommy dragged people up to the altar, too, telling the congregation he had seen them come out of a movie or a dance, and make them kneel down so the whole church could come up and pray for their souls. I think he used to patrol the streets after the dances and movies let out, looking for kids from his church.