I was still asleep, and looked out the window when his knock woke me up. I threw on some clothes, ran a brush through my hair, and answered the door in less than two minutes. He looked a little like Burt Reynolds, with ultramarine blue eyes and dark hair. He was funny and convincing, and I decided Tech might not be such a bad place to go after all. I said I’d think about it. Before he left, he asked me out to the movies. His family lived up on Crow Mountain and grew watermelons as a cash crop. He was paying his way through school on an ROTC scholarship, so it was a foregone conclusion that he would be joining the army when he graduated. This was 1966, and Vietnam was just beginning to get hot but wasn’t yet the explosive war it became in the next couple of years.
When I started dating Larry, I was still seeing Rex off and on, and occasionally a few others as well, such as a boy named Audie Ray, who had a tiny Triumph sports car and a broken left leg. He had to drive with his cast out the window, so we worked out a routine where he would use the clutch and brake with his right foot and I would work the gas pedal. I can’t believe we didn’t wreck the car. One memorable afternoon, Audie Ray was at my house, Larry stopped by, and Rex showed up. We all sat in the living room trying to talk, them waiting one another out. I wanted to sneak out the back door and leave, but I was too much of a good Southern hostess, so there we sat, drinking Cokes, them talking about football like they had all come there specifically to hang out with one another. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Audie Ray left, then Rex, and Larry was the winner. That got him a lot of points.
I had promised Rex I would go with him to the homecoming dance months in advance, and he held me to the promise even though I was seeing more of Larry at that time. I don’t know why I just didn’t say no, but I had some weird, strong ideas about keeping my word, and Rex was emphatic that I couldn’t back out on a promise. I was the homecoming maid, and since Rex was the captain of the football team and had to escort the queen, another football player named Robert Lee (whom I wasn’t dating) escorted me across the field.
It was the biggest thrill of my high school years. Although I never got to be a cheerleader, which the most popular girls were, I made good grades in class, was in most of the clubs, edited the school newspaper, and sang in the glee club. I was a good kid who didn’t smoke or drink, and was certainly not going to have sex until I married. At least that was the plan.
Larry wasn’t happy that I was at homecoming with Rex, but he came with another girl named Janet and we spent the entire night gloomily looking at each other across the dance floor, dancing with the wrong partner. It was my last date with Rex. From then on, Larry and I were going steady.
Our dates consisted for the most part of going to his brother and sister-in-law’s house to play cards. If you remember, cards were on the sin list (Larry didn’t go to church, so he didn’t have a sin list), but we never played for money, just for fun, so I didn’t worry too much about it. My mother and father had relaxed a bit, knowing it was impossible to ask me to stay home from movies. They knew I went to parties but never asked me head-on if I was dancing, and I never said. Needless to say, Mother, Daddy, and I never once discussed sex, or even said the word out loud.
When I was thirteen, I of course knew I would start my period soon. Several of my girlfriends already had theirs, and one had gotten hers in the fourth grade. We all used to accompany her to the high school bathroom where they had a Kotex machine, and stand guard while she put in her nickel and got her pad. We felt grown-up, indeed. Finally one summer day, when my mother was outside in the garden, I found a spot of blood on my underwear. I was thrilled and frightened, and although she had never once mentioned anything about it to me, I needed her to know it had happened. I went out and said, “Mother, I think I’ve just started my period.” She stopped hoeing the weeds for a minute and said, “Well, go take care of it,” then continued chopping. I went back in and found her box of pads and some safety pins and took care of it.
My friends and I never discussed sex like friends do today, their role models being the Sex and the City girls, ours being Nancy Drew and Sandra Dee. We talked about girls who were sleeping with boys as being tramps, and if any of us were doing it, or anything close to it, we never admitted it to one another. I think most of our crowd in the senior class were virgins. Most of the boys were, too, in spite of what they bragged about. The furthest I had gone with anyone was kissing and wrestling in the backseat, and a little light boob petting. I was, of course, determined to save the big moment for the honeymoon. But at seventeen, hormones seemed to kick into a higher gear, and when Larry and I had been going steady for a while, the life changing experience occurred. I was wearing a pink Bobbie Brooks skirt and sweater, and the main thing I remember was worrying that it would get blood on it. I really liked that skirt. While I was worrying, the event came and went. Or went and came, as the case may be. I remember thinking, “Is that IT?” I felt like I had gotten distracted for a moment and missed it. There was a small amount of blood—a spot the size of a silver dollar—on my underwear, but my skirt was fine. I remember going to bed that night thinking, “Well, now we’re married in the eyes of God.” That was a popular rationalization. It meant that as long as you intended to get married at some point down the road, sex wasn’t a sin. Or as much of one.
The sex got better as we learned together. I think he had been with one other girl before me (one of the bad girls we all talked about, not Sharon), which had been a disagreeable experience, so we were pretty much on the same level. From then on, along with playing cards with his brother and sister-in-law, sex was the big thing on our dates, and people began to treat us like an old married couple. Several of my friends got married right after graduation. A few had gotten married while they were still in school, with babies on the way. That, of course, was a constant worry, but for some reason I never got pregnant, even though we didn’t use birth control. Perversely, I began to wonder if I could have children.
I did indeed go to Tech instead of State Teachers, rooming with Larry’s twin sister, Linda, and even managed to get an academic scholarship, which I lost my second semester after getting a C in chemistry. I normally would never have gone near chemistry, but I was required to take it for my major, and I wanted to get it over with. My lab partner was inept, too, and we once set the lab on fire, which didn’t endear me to my professor.
I was the center of everything in high school, but college was a whole new experience. There were more people at Tech than in the entire town of Atkins, half of them were boys—half of those were cute, and I wanted to date them. Having my boyfriend’s twin sister as my roommate was a little tricky, though; even if I’d wanted to cheat, she knew where I was every minute. So I didn’t cheat, but I wanted to, and even that made me feel guilty.
I started off as a home economics major, since I had loved my teacher in high school, Mary Gay, and couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do. Then, along with chemistry, one of the required courses for the home ec major was basic art, and I fell in love with it. The art teacher, Helen Marshall, convinced me I was good at painting, drawing, clay, and other studio arts. Art was so much more fun than anything else I had tried; there were no tests, just displays of our work, and so I changed my major and became part of the art crowd, which was also, de facto, the hippie crowd. In 1967, boys were just beginning to grow their hair long in Arkansas, and most of them were art majors.
I also entered my second beauty contest, for Miss Arkansas Tech, but I only got fourth runner-up, even though I did great on my song, “I Wanna Be Free” by the Monkees. After that, encouraged by my friends, I entered the Miss Russellville competition, but unhappily on the night of the pageant, I got a stomach virus and had to keep running backstage to throw up. Not too attractive, coming out onstage in a white bathing suit with a green complexion. Or singing “What Now, My Love,” which was partly in French, while trying to keep from barfing. Although I worked hard on learning the lyrics by rote with a French teacher, it was a big fiasco
when I switched to French on the second verse and got mixed up on the words. The audience sat there, stunned, not having a clue what I was saying or what language I was saying it in. As an added bonus, it was slightly off-key, just enough to make you grind your teeth, so that was the end of my pageant life. Still, the contests nudged me a little bit further into the limelight at school. Guys started asking me out in greater numbers, and I hated to have to tell them I was going steady, but I was.
Larry was a wildlife biology major, was in ROTC—with his hair shorn into a military buzz cut—and we were already beginning to grow apart. More than anything, he loved fishing and hunting, things I couldn’t bear. (One of his favorite fishing spots was called the Snake Hole. The name pretty much said it all.) When I went over to his house, I never knew if the boiling pot on the stove contained dinner, or if it was six or eight decapitated roadkill heads he was cleaning for a skull collection in one of his classes. (Well, actually, it wasn’t that hard to tell the difference.) Once, I was looking in the freezer for ice cream and saw, poking out of Reynolds Wrap, the feet of a mink he was going to use for taxidermy class.
I tried to take an interest in hunting and fishing. He got out the shotgun and gave me a lesson, but it had such a kick that it sent me flying backward and bruised my shoulder. I went with him once to the deer woods, getting up in the early morning dark and tracking around in the freezing snow, but I made so much noise that he sent me back to the car. He thought I did it on purpose so the deer would hear me and run away. He was a state champion archer, but when I tried it, I couldn’t hold my arm properly and kept hitting it with the string until my arm was one bruise from my shoulder to my wrist. I tried to go fishing with him—I at least liked to eat fish—but he had to bait my hook. I just couldn’t put that sharp thing through the eye of a minnow or thread a worm onto it, and it was so boring that I would bring a book and read. Once we went out for what I thought was going to be a romantic boat ride on the lake. We took only a flimsy rubber raft, but we weren’t going far from the shore. It was a clear night with a full moon, and I quickly discovered he really had fishing on his mind, not romance. I was bored, sitting in the dark, looking up at the sky, when a dark object flew across the moon. “Oh, look, Larry! That’s so weird. There’s a bird flying at night!”
“That’s no bird; that’s a bat.” He ignored it and kept throwing his line out, trying for a huge catfish, which are easier to catch at night or something. The lake, usually romantic from the front seat of the car, was creepy in the light rubber boat. Frogs croaked a lonesome song, and things splashed in the water next to our raft with slithery sounds. I looked up, and the bat flew across the moon again, this time lower. I hunkered down in the boat as the thing starting circling us, and soon it was flying close enough to make us duck. Larry swung the paddle at the bat, and I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my head so it wouldn’t get hung up in my hair. I’d heard that had happened once, and the girl had gone crazy, as I suspected I would, too.
“This thing is acting strange. It might be rabid,” he said, slightly out of breath. “Let’s get out of here!” But getting out of there entailed paddling, and he couldn’t paddle and swing at the bat at the same time. It came so close that I felt it brush my head, which really flipped me out. Larry paddled as fast as he could, taking time to flail at the bat as it passed over us. Instead of the bat going away after we got on land, it was still attacking us. We ran down the road, the bat chasing us, dive-bombing our heads, and finally, panting with fear and exhaustion, we got to the car. Larry jumped in and locked the doors before he realized I wasn’t in the car, too, and there I was, without my shirt—which was wrapped around my head so I could hardly see—pounding on the windows. He quickly let me in, and I slammed the door just as the bat smacked into the window. It fell to the ground, but we didn’t stop to see if it was dead or not. I’m sure it was rabid. Bats just don’t attack humans unless they are. So that was one more reason for me never to go out night fishing again. As if I needed another one.
Larry, on the other hand, had absolutely no interest at all in my artwork. He said that art was just playing, it wasn’t even a real college major. Still, we were together, having great sex. In God’s eyes we were married, as I convinced myself, still fending off my nightmares of hell, and we did have fun. He had a great sense of humor, and he could make me laugh, which was a fine attribute.
I WORKED AS secretary to my adviser, Helen Marshall, who became my mentor. She was my inspiration as an artist and as a woman. She had lived in Puerto Rico, had traveled all around the world, and told me I had talent and could do anything I wanted to do if I just wanted it badly enough. There were two other girls, Aurora Young and Jean Jewell, who worked for Mrs. Marshall as well, and we became like the Three Musketeers. Aurora was from the Philippines but had moved here when she was three, so she was as much a hillbilly as the rest of us. Jean was from Little Rock, a gentle mother earth type who had honest blue eyes and long hair that was already beginning to gray at eighteen, and she practiced Buddhism, getting up early in the mornings to chant.
As well as being Mrs. Marshall’s secretary, I posed for figure drawing class (in a bathing suit) and worked in a little art shop she owned. I didn’t make much money at the shop since there was always some goodie like a handwoven poncho or a silver ring I wanted to buy instead of taking the salary. But with the money I had saved from working at the pickle plant the previous summer (I worked there three summers) it was enough to pay my tuition, although not quite enough for my room and board, so I moved back home for my second year, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as living in the dorm. Larry was set to graduate at midterm to join the service as a second lieutenant and I convinced him we had to get married before he left. I was afraid he would be killed in Vietnam, and then, of course, there would be no possibility of getting married, and what we were doing in the backseat of his blue Chevy Nova would send me to hell. Larry, God knows why, went along with me, even though I really don’t believe he wanted to, and we got married August 15, 1969. He was twenty-two and I was twenty.
I had nightmares about the wedding for weeks before it occurred. In every dream, I would be walking down the aisle in some bizarre, creepy setting, like an abandoned warehouse, or the train tracks late at night. Then I would step up to take his hand and discover it wasn’t Larry at all but some monster. I was obviously feeling a little unsure about the whole thing, but I forged ahead anyhow. My cousin Carla Watson and my best friend since the age of five, Susan Gibson, were my bridesmaids, and when I told them I wanted yellow to be my color, neither of them felt like they looked good in yellow, so I agreed to have blue, even though it is one of my least favorite colors. I bought fabric and had a wedding gown made by Ruby Eakes, a nice lady from the church who sewed for people, for twenty-five dollars. It was a satin Empire waistline dress with a lace mantilla, and I carried daisies, so at least I had a touch of yellow. A friend, Martha Bowden, made the cake, and we had punch and nuts and mints at the reception. I think the whole thing must have cost less than fifty dollars.
Larry and me at the altar with Brother Bob Rackley.
As my father and I were standing in the vestibule of the church, waiting to walk down the aisle, he turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, “You don’t have to go through with this. You can leave right now and it will be okay.” I was crying myself, but said, “No, I have to. It’s too late.” He knew why I was doing it, I’m pretty sure, and knew I was making a mistake, but I was saving my soul from hellfire, so down the aisle we went.
We didn’t have a honeymoon. I had quit school and taken a job as a secretary in a small steel company to support us until Larry graduated in January. Then I was going back to school to finish the year while he went to basic training. I would join him after school was out in May. The job was an absolute fiasco. I had lied and told them I could take shorthand dictation, and while I was a pretty good typist, I had three male bosses who each piled so much work on me it would have been impo
ssible for one experienced woman to do it all, much less an untrained girl. I had to make coffee for them all day, copy blueprints, and do all the billing. (They taught me to change the way I wrote numbers: eights were to be two O’s stacked on top of each other like a snowman, sevens had a line across the leg, twos never had a loop on the bottom, fours came to a peak at the top and were never open. I still do them that way.) I had to answer the phone, type up the contracts and letters with four carbons (so I couldn’t make any mistakes or I had to retype them), plus whatever else there was to do. I preferred to doodle portraits on the desk pad while answering the phone, which I thought were pretty good, but the bosses were unimpressed. We were located a couple of miles from town, too, and one of the bosses who was a chain-smoker kept me running into town for cigarettes for him (using my own car and gas, which I resented). I was simply overwhelmed and in way over my head.
Larry and I had gotten married on a Friday, and on Monday, as he did every week, the big boss came in and added more stuff for me to do. He was probably around thirty-five, an old man to me, but looking back, he was rather attractive in a slick diamond-pinkie-ring way—buffed nails, blinding white shirts, and bright ties. I was bending over the file cabinet (wearing a miniskirt, as was the fashion then and probably the reason I was hired in the first place) when I felt a hand placed intimately on my rear end. Without thinking or checking to see who it was, I whirled around and clocked him. His face turned purple red with anger, and while I was shocked by what I had done, I was more angry at him. Without a word, he stormed out, and later in the afternoon, the next in command called me into the office and fired me. I asked him why, and he answered, “Mistakes.” I wasn’t such a good secretary that I could defend my work. Maybe it was legitimately work mistakes. But I don’t think so.
A Ticket to the Circus Page 4