A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  By the time we got home after service, I was so scared I couldn’t sleep. I would lie there and watch the clock hands, waiting for the midnight hour when the world would end. Only after the hands passed twelve could I relax and go to sleep, often to have dreams that I was standing in the middle of a beautiful meadow when the sky opened up and there was an angry God, telling me I had committed a sin and hadn’t asked for forgiveness, and I was going to hell. Then the ground would open up and I would start to fall into the fire below. I woke up screaming for my daddy, who always came and held me until I could go back to sleep.

  Those dreams went on for years. Finally, at one of the services, I was so overwrought that I went up when he made the altar call, and everyone came and prayed with me, asking that Jesus would save my soul. I’m not sure what it was I was asking forgiveness for at eight, probably for not liking Brother Tommy, but I prayed, “Forgive me of all my sins,” thinking that should cover it. Then, a few Sundays later, we all went to the creek and I was baptized, along with several other new Christians. I wore a dress, of course, pinched my nose, and tried not to panic as a preacher named Brother Henry held me and dipped me backward under the water, saying, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize you, my sister.” I thought the nightmares would go away, but it didn’t really help.

  In one way or another, either in living the Christian life or rebelling against it, religion has shaped me more than anything else. No matter how hard I try, I’ve never really gotten away from worrying about sin, although I’ve certainly left most of the harsh hell beliefs behind and have forged my own optimistic vision of God as a loving creator who would never send His children to burn forever for having a glass of wine or dancing or making love. Sex is something that God Himself created, and it was man who decided it was evil for a lot of twisted reasons. The story of Jesus is a beautiful one, if the words attributed to Him in the Bible are what He actually said, which, frankly, is unlikely given the propensity of reporters to get it all wrong and translators to screw it up, but even if the Bible didn’t record His exact words, I believe His message of love is truly what God is. I don’t think Jesus ever once threatened anybody with hell.

  By the time I was eleven or twelve, we had a different preacher who didn’t preach hell or lurk around outside dances, so I relaxed a little bit. I had a friend named Cherry, a year older than me, who had great-smelling honey-colored hair, green eyes, and tan skin. (I named the heroine Cherry in my two novels, although my fictional Cherry was nowhere as cool as the real one was.) She was the granddaughter of the town banker and had a blue parakeet named Elvis who could wolf whistle and say his name. She always had the newest clothes and enormous piles of presents under her tree at Christmas. One year, we got autograph books, and Cherry’s page to me read: “On top of old Smoky, all covered with blood, I saw my (UGH) friend Bar—her head stuck in the mud. There’s an axe in her stomach and a knife in her head. I jumped to the conclusion that Barbara was dead!”

  That not being enough, she wrote one more: “Sitting by a stream, Barbara had a dream. She dreamed she was a fat old trout and some creep fished her out.”

  I laughed because I wanted her to like me, but it wasn’t funny. Cherry had great legs from taking ballet lessons. I so envied her those legs and the pink satin toe shoes and net tutu, but it never occurred to me to ask to take ballet myself. At twelve, Cherry had breasts, wore white lipstick and white short shorts, and gave the best dance parties under her carport, while I was still playing with dolls. She didn’t want to invite me to her parties unless I danced, so she decided to teach me, along with a chubby boy named Kenny from across the street. We were her charity project. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I really wanted to go to those parties. Cherry played the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” while Kenny and I tried to do the steps she showed us, and somehow we got good enough to be invited. Later that year, she told me she wouldn’t continue to be my friend if I kept on playing with Barbie, and since she made me choose and I wouldn’t lie about it, I chose Barbie. She called me on Christmas morning to ask if I had gotten a second Barbie, which I had, and she was as good as her word and threw me over for an older girl named Bobbye Ann, another cool girl with boobs who already went out with boys. It was my first touch of heartbreak.

  The dancing was my first little foray into sin, but it was so much fun I didn’t worry too much about it. It somehow didn’t feel like a sin. And I didn’t tell my parents. I loved them both so much, but I learned early on that I couldn’t tell them what I was feeling, what I wanted or needed or feared. Once, when I was having one of my nightmares, my mother wanted to call the preacher over to pray with me. She had no idea he was the reason for the nightmare. I always wanted to be the perfect daughter, the perfect Christian, and so I learned to pretend to them that I was. I wish I could have confided in them and asked their advice sometimes, but I knew they would just say “Don’t do that, it’s a sin” and be disappointed in me. My father was the most perfect man I knew. He was always helping someone else, driving old ladies to the doctor, taking fatherless little boys swimming or fishing, always doing things for everyone.

  But as much as my father believed in Jesus, as good as he had lived his life, religion was not a comfort to him as he was dying years later when he was seventy-eight. He lay there in the hospital for months, worrying, combing his memory, trying to remember something he had done wrong, something that he had done and hadn’t been forgiven for, something he should have done and didn’t do. Something that would send him to hell. He even said to me, “I’m so sorry I spanked you when you were a little girl.” I couldn’t hold back the tears. “Oh, Daddy,” I said, “I don’t even remember that. And I probably deserved it anyhow.” But he wouldn’t be comforted. I told him, “You’ve loved Jesus all your life, and He’s not going to let you go to hell.” I sincerely believed that. If anybody is in heaven, my father is, but I knew then that I wasn’t the only one who had been affected by those hell sermons, and I wish to God it had been different.

  Four

  When I was twelve, my mother turned our carport into a beauty shop. A few years before that, when I could stay on my own in the afternoons after school, she had decided to go back to work. After my father’s accident, we needed the income, so she tried a string of different jobs. One was picking cotton, which she at least was familiar with. Every morning before I went to school, a rattletrap pickup truck would stop outside our house. My mother—wearing faded jeans, some kind of old shirt, and one of those sunbonnets made from printed cotton that puffed out on top like a muffin—would climb up into the open back with a load of people dressed just like she was and head for some cotton patch. She worked all day in the hot sun and came back long after I got home from school. That didn’t last too long. I was happy when she quit. I was embarrassed for anybody to see her dressed like that, riding in the back of a truck.

  Then she got an even worse job on the pinning line at the chicken plant, but it paid more. She and several other women stood for eight hours a shift on a wet concrete floor and pulled feathers out of chickens after they had been tied, flopping and screeching, by the feet, had been hung on a moving wire, and had had their heads dipped into a pool of electrified water, which shocked them to death. Her arms ached so much from holding them up in the same position and pulling out feathers that she could hardly move at night, and she was always slightly green and sick with a runny nose from the cold plant, even though she wore sweaters under her coverall and two pairs of socks inside her rubber boots. I went with her to pick up her last check, and I nearly threw up from the smell, just in the office. I had the courage only once to peek inside the actual plant to look at the chickens drifting around the room on their conveyer wire, getting plucked here, split open there, and their innards pulled out at the next station, and then I had to get out into the fresh air.

  When no other job could be found, we were driving down the street in Russellville and saw that someone was pu
tting in a new beauty school. It was a six-month course, and my father said he would turn the carport into a beauty shop for her if she wanted. She was so happy at the school with all the other women, a lot of them her age, learning how to cut hair and do perms and color and perform the newest rage, back-combing, also known as teasing or ratting, to make all the hair fluff out into a bubble. They used real people for the students to practice on, and since beauty school treatments were, of course, cheaper than regular beauty shops, it gave women who normally couldn’t afford it the luxury of having their hair and nails done. The local nursing home would bring all the old ladies in by the busload once a week, and when they left, they waved cheerfully from the bus, their bouffant hair in assorted pastel hues filling the windows like cotton candy. I used to go and hang out with Mother on Saturday, and at lunchtime we’d go across the street to the drugstore and get a pimento cheese sandwich and a Coke at the soda fountain. All day, I would watch and absorb the lessons. I practiced on my friends, and am still a pretty good haircutter, if I do say so myself. (Norman never again went to a barber after we got together, and he delighted in telling people I cut his hair. “Just think of all the money we’ve saved over the years!” he’d say.)

  Me in the sixth grade with my cat’s-eye glasses.

  Of course, I was my mother’s at-home practice dummy, and for a year or two after she started school, I had short perm-fried hair that embarrassed me. So when I was thirteen, I put my foot down and told her I was never letting her cut or perm my hair again. I felt bad about hurting her feelings, but that hair, along with my thick rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses, made me the ugliest girl in the sixth grade. At least one of them.

  Mother loved everything about her little Steel Magnolias shop. She had people to talk to all day, the work wasn’t odious or odiferous or backbreaking, and she made decent money. The going rate in 1963 was a dollar and a quarter for a shampoo and set. (Your hair was rolled on brush rollers and you were put under a hair dryer that looked like a space helmet. It roared so loudly it made you deaf, while hot jets of air cooked your ears.) Another dollar bought you a haircut, and ten dollars got you a perm, cut included. She named the shop Gay’s Beauty Shop, which was lovely until the term “gay” for homosexuals became popular, and then some kid or other was always prank-calling her, thinking they were so clever. She worked in that little shop until she was in her eighties, and then when my father passed away, she moved to Cape Cod to live with me.

  Just about the time my hair grew out in seventh grade, I fell at the skating rink, my rhinestone glasses flew off and slid across the floor, and somebody skated right over them. I had to wait two weeks to get new ones, groping in a fog of nearsightedness and squinting at the blackboard. I went to a basketball game in the gym, where the concession stand was up on a high stage, and when I started back down the stairs, I missed the top step and fell about seven feet to the gym floor, flinging my popcorn and Coke out onto the court. They had to stop the game and clean it up. I was bruised from the fall, but was more humiliated as everyone clapped and cheered while I slunk out. But the strangest thing was happening: without the glasses, all of a sudden guys were taking another look at me and started asking me out.

  My first real date was with a boy named Jimmy, who played cornet in the band. I had come down with hepatitis A the summer I was fourteen and had to stay in bed for six weeks. That was 1963, and Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” and a Japanese song called “Sukiyaki” played over and over and over on the radio until I thought I would lose my mind. As I was contagious and could have no visitors, Jimmy used to come and stand outside my window and talk to me for hours. Then one day he slipped his silver band medal through a crack in the screen, and we were going steady. It seemed that I was forever going steady, but in that little town, after you dated someone a few times, everyone assumed you were a couple and the other boys didn’t ask you out.

  Gaynell in her beauty shop.

  After I recovered from hepatitis, we double-dated with Larry Aldridge, a friend of Jimmy’s who was sixteen and had his own car—a 1958 blue-and-white DeSoto with huge fins. We went to church or the movies or places like Al’s snack bar for great hamburgers and curlicue french fries, or to the Freezer Fresh, which was the kids’ favorite hangout owned by a couple—Winnie and Leon, who had only one arm. It was amazing how he could do everything like make milk shakes and flip burgers with that stump. Then we’d drive around the streets, and wind up the evening by parking out by the lake or up on the bluffs of Crow Mountain. That was about the only thing there was to do in Atkins, although there was a skating rink and a bowling alley and a movie theater twelve miles away in Russellville, and a drive-in movie in the summer. After a year or so, Jimmy fell in love with a friend of mine named Ann, and he broke up with me, although she was a year older than he was and only thought of him as a little brother. Of course, I was devastated, although now I really can’t remember quite why I was so taken with him.

  Now that I’m writing my memoir, it will be clear to those of you who have read my novels that I’m shattering a lot of my crystals. Norman had a great image he called the crystal to explain a tool for writing fiction. You take the crystal of your experience and beam the light of your imagination through it, and the story comes out in a different direction, in different colors, but the basis is the same experience. One situation might serve as the crystal for several scenes in your fiction, and I have done that throughout my work. You will probably recognize certain things in this book if you have read Windchill Summer and Cheap Diamonds.

  After Jimmy, I started dating a boy I’ll call Rex. Rex and I went steady as well, when all I really wanted was to be free and date a lot of guys, but he kept on putting his ring on a chain around my neck, which felt more like a dog leash. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I finally went along because it was easier than arguing with him. Nobody else was asking me out anyhow. Rex was jealous and big and was a star football player with a reputation for being somewhat of a tough guy.

  Then a boy named Jerry came to visit his aunt and uncle for the summer. He was from California and had actually surfed, which was a huge deal at the time, as the Beach Boys were at the height of their fame, and the Mamas and the Papas’ monster hit “California Dreamin’” made us all long to go to, or at least know somebody from, California. He wasn’t in the least afraid of Rex. Jerry and I went to the drive-in with another couple, where A Summer Place with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue was playing. Sitting in the backseat with Jerry was such sweet torture. I wouldn’t let him kiss me, as I was going steady, and I guess I thought if we didn’t kiss it wasn’t really cheating, but we would almost kiss, our lips getting so close we could feel the heat. It was exquisitely painful. Then we stopped at a gas station on the way home, and while the attendant was filling up the tank, Rex happened by and saw us. What bad luck. I can’t remember if actual blows were exchanged or not, but there was a fight of sorts.

  After that, there was no reason not to kiss Jerry, so I did and fell hard for him, as only one can at fifteen with an older boy of seventeen. After the summer, he went back to his family, who had by then moved to Kentucky, which was not nearly as glamorous as California, but he promised he was going to come back at Thanksgiving vacation and we were going to run away to California and get married. I didn’t take it too seriously, and I frankly don’t know what I would have done if he had pulled up in the yard and said, “Hop in. Let’s go,” but I did desperately want to see him again. One day, right before Thanksgiving, the letters we had been exchanging every few days just stopped. My old boyfriend Rex dropped by to give me a cryptic message. “Have you heard from Jerry?” he asked, smirking a little.

  “Not in a while,” I said. I never was any good at lying.

  “Well, I just wondered. You might want to call him.” That was weird. He seemed so happy about something.

  I got Jerry’s father on the phone. In those days, it would never have occurred to me to call a boy, especially long distance, but
I was really worried. “Could I speak to Jerry, please?” I asked.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone to get his marriage license.”

  “Oh,” I said, when I could finally speak. “Well, can you give him a message for me? Tell him Barbara Davis called and said for him to drop dead.”

  What an ugly thing to say to his father! But I was so angry I didn’t know what else to say. I never spoke to him again, but years later I heard that he became a professional wrestler and then a preacher (or maybe it was the other way around). He and the girl, whose name, I think, was Barbara, had four children and are probably still married, and I thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t me who bought that license with him.

  Five

  I had known the boy who would become my first husband, Larry Norris, most of my life, but we weren’t friends, as he was two classes ahead of me and had gone steady with a girl in his grade named Sharon for most of high school. He was popular, a good football player, a track star, and an all-around athlete. Sharon wore his little gold track shoe on a delicate chain around her neck, and I remember being a little envious of it. Then she fell in love with a boy named Bill and broke up with Larry, breaking his heart. She and Bill got married, and Larry went off to Arkansas Tech. The summer before my senior year, he was working for the school, going around to all the seniors in the area and trying to convince them to go to school there. I had already decided to go to Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway, and I even had an academic scholarship promised, but Larry showed up at my door early one summer morning.