A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  I had been married for three days and had lost my job. We had rent to pay, groceries to buy, and no income. So I drove directly from the steel company to the employment agency and was sent to the shoe factory, where I immediately got an office job. (I was still wearing the miniskirt.) I think it was even for more money. I had been making around fifty dollars a week at the steel company, which was minimum wage—$1.30 an hour—and I think I was making $1.35, maybe even $1.37, at the shoe factory. And the bonus was that we could get shoes at wholesale—every girl’s dream!

  I worked through the fall semester, then quit the minute Larry graduated in January. I hated the job, which I wasn’t good at, either, as it was keeping an accounting of eyelets and shoelaces and whatever else went into the shoes, and numbers are not my friends. Still, Larry and I had fun those first few months, looking at our thick white gold rings, saying “my husband” or “my wife,” playing house, and, most important of all, sleeping in a real bed instead of the backseat of the car. We rented a two-bedroom apartment in Atkins near my parents, and I learned to cook, experimenting on poor Larry, since my mother had never taught me. When I was growing up, she thought it was easier to do it herself than try to teach me, and I agreed. Her mother never taught her, either, so she probably thought that if she could figure it out, I could, too, and eventually I did.

  I made a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners, spaghetti, and pizza from a Chef Boyardee mix. (There were no pizza parlors in those days, or Chinese restaurants or Italian or anything remotely ethnic. They didn’t even sell garlic in some markets. Nobody knew what to do with it.) I would use the crust mix from the pizza box and make the dough, then add more tomato sauce to the small can provided and put Jimmy Dean sausage or pepperoni or mushrooms and mozzarella cheese on top. It was better than any I have had since. The rest of our meals were fried something or other. For meat we had ham or pork or bacon his parents cured themselves, beef they grew, chickens that ran around, and the fish and occasional game Larry brought home, like deer or quail or squirrel. I would eat the quail, watching for bird shot that might break a tooth, but I wouldn’t touch the deer or squirrel at all. His mother cooked that.

  Mrs. Norris had happily cooked game all her life—deer and squirrels (with the macabre squirrel heads on the platter, their little eyeholes and teeth peeking out of the crispy brown crust), but I couldn’t bring myself to even taste it—it was too close to rat for me. Larry’s mother and father gave us part of a calf they butchered every year for the freezer, and they had a huge garden. I still salivate thinking of the big ripe tomatoes, the fresh corn taken right out of the field and boiled before it lost its sweetness, and the squash and okra we picked and promptly sliced thin, dipped in flour, salt, and pepper, and then fried. We ate chicken-fried steak, cornbread and pinto beans or green beans cooked all morning with a piece of salt pork until they were a greasy wonderful mush, and baby green onions; turnip greens with hot pepper sauce and homemade pickles. My mother-in-law tried to teach me how to can and make jelly and jam, but I was not that into it. I once fell out of a mulberry tree trying to get berries for jam and landed in a prickly pear patch. Everyone thought that was hilarious except me. We picked ripe peaches and apples out of trees, and flicked wasps off juicy yellow plums. They were so drunk on the sweet juice, they didn’t even sting.

  I drove the tractor while they harvested huge black diamond watermelons, and we would sometimes bust one open in the field and eat the red hearts out with our hands, juice running down our elbows. When we were in high school, boys were always sneaking up on the mountain to steal watermelons at night, and sometimes a farmer kept a shotgun loaded with rock salt to shoot at them for their trouble. The doctor was always sighing and picking rock salt out of someone’s behind. It was weird to know that some of my friends were helping themselves to my boyfriend’s family’s living, but it was the adventure as much as the watermelons they craved, and they never took too many.

  Larry’s midterm graduation finally came, with a ceremony where I pinned the lieutenant’s bars on his new uniform and we got our picture in the paper. Then he went off to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for basic training, and I went back to college for the first half of my junior year. And that’s when my troubles began.

  Six

  I soon discovered that being married put me into a whole new category at Tech. I was excluded from all kinds of things, like being in the Athena Troop, an elite drill team the ROTC members chose that performed at football games at halftime in short, tight uniforms and hats with gold feathers. I got my hand-embossed invitation in the mail, then they found out I was married and rescinded it. Of course, there was no question of being in the homecoming court, or being the sweetheart of any fraternity. I was married. I was twenty years old and might as well have been eighty as far as college life was concerned. The only thing I still managed to do was a little modeling. A photographer named Bill Ward had been hired to take pictures of all the contestants for the Miss Russellville pageant program the year before, and he later asked me to pose from time to time for local department store ads in the Log Cabin Democrat. An older man of twenty-seven, he was married and was also the choir director at church, so there was no romance, but he did have nice green eyes and longish blond hair, which was cool. He’d started a new trend of posing his subjects outdoors near brooks and in meadows of wildflowers, old barns, and woods instead of in a stiff studio, and everyone went to him for their wedding announcement pictures.

  Ever since high school, I’d had the impossible dream of becoming a model, and I read Glamour and Vogue every month. Seeing myself in the Log Cabin Democrat ads made me believe it might be a real possibility. One of the teachers from Atkins had a daughter named Sarah Thom who was once a successful model in New York. Before the wedding, I got up my courage and wrote her a letter, included some pictures Bill Ward had taken, and asked her if she thought I had a chance. I suppose it was a secret last-ditch effort to go for a dream and not settle for life in a small town, cleaning fish and teaching school, so I didn’t tell anyone else I had done it. Sarah Thom sent the pictures on to Eileen Ford, her agent, who sent me back a form letter basically saying I should forget it and seek another career. It was a harsh wake-up to reality, and I filed that dream away. But it was fun to be a Log Cabin Democrat girl once in a while.

  I moved back home to save money after Larry went to basic training, and my parents were even tougher on me than when I was single. They thought I should be home by nine o’clock so nobody would think I was doing anything improper. “What will people think?” was their mantra. I couldn’t go to a dance or party, and even going to the movies with my girlfriends was suspect. I spent a lot of evenings watching TV and writing to Larry. In those days, a long-distance phone call was an event worthy of mention in the social section of The Atkins Chronicle, as in, “Viola Higgins’s daughter, Sue Ellen, called her all the way from Visalia, California, to wish her a happy birthday.” Long distance was expensive, and stamps were only six cents.

  Modeling for Bill Ward.

  Then Russellville had its centennial celebration. They hired a company out of Virginia to come and organize the show, and to get me out of the house and doing something fun, a girlfriend of mine named Toni brought me to a meeting about it. The man they sent as the director was an adorable guy I’ll call Edmond who was a dancer full of graceful energy. He was small and compact and had a neat black beard, longish hair (but not offensively long for the older folks), and wore yellow aviator sunglasses. I fell madly in love (or something approximating it) with him at first sight. Of course, being married was much more restrictive than going steady, and the last thing I was ever going to do was cheat on my husband; even the thought of it was enough to make me worry about hell, but these things have a life of their own, hell or not, and I found myself alone in the house one day when he dropped by to discuss some skit he wanted me to be in. I swear nothing was going on except talk, but my parents came back while he was in the living room and knew immediately
from the pheromones in the air that this guy was trouble.

  I found myself making excuses to stop by his office, reasons to linger after rehearsals. He needed special meetings with me to work on a song, he needed help writing some dialogue. We kissed once, a stolen one, and then we kissed a lot. He was terrific at it. It was much more painful than the almost-kisses with Jerry in the backseat at the drive-in, because now that the cork was out of the bottle sex-wise, there was no putting it back in. I was used to a lively sex life and my husband was gone. But I didn’t dare cross that line.

  School was out in May, I’d completed half my junior year, and it was time for me to join Larry. He had been transferred from Fort Knox to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and I was going to be with him there until he had to leave for Vietnam right before Christmas. Edmond had given up on getting me into bed—it was just too frustrating, he said—and we agreed we’d never see each other again. But the day before I was to leave, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up my courage and went to his apartment early in the morning, driving around the block about ten times first.

  It was a stupid thing to do, for many reasons, but one was that it never occurred to me he might have another woman there. Fortunately, he didn’t, and when he saw me standing in the doorway, he grabbed me and pulled me into the bedroom. It took about one minute to get undressed, and another two or three from start to finish. It was over before I really knew what had happened. Because he was such a great kisser, I had expected the rest to be something spectacular, but it was like those pastries in the bakery case that look so delicious but taste like white paste. I got dressed and left in a flood of guilt and anxiety, and the next day I squeezed into my green Volkswagen, which was packed to the roof, to drive to Fort Campbell and move into army housing. I’m sure my parents breathed a sigh of relief when I left town. I was a ticking bomb waiting to go off at any minute. I’m sure they had no idea the bomb had already gone off, and had been a dud.

  Seven

  Fort Campbell is right on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, and our house was spot on the line, our living room in Tennessee and our bedroom in Kentucky. It was small, a two-bedroom bungalow with gray linoleum floors and the walls a freshly painted chalk-white. I can’t bear flat white walls or the color gray, but we weren’t allowed to paint them, so I had to settle for hanging up colorful pictures and putting down rugs to make it seem less like an institution. The kitchen had old appliances from the fifties, and nestled in the white metal cabinets was a roll of roach killing paper packed tight with the nest of a thousand roaches. Across the street was a golf course, handy for Larry, who was good at most sports and liked golfing. The house was a two-family bungalow, the other side a mirror of ours but empty. I was so happy to see Larry, so guilty about my little escapade with Edmond, that we had a great reunion.

  Larry at Fort Campbell.

  Larry was an armored cavalry officer, the 3rd Platoon leader for F Troop 17th Cavalry, 23rd Infantry Division (made famous by Lieutenant William Calley, who was at the center of the infamous My Lai Massacre). Larry didn’t mind spending his days inside a hot tank, but I had such claustrophobia that I popped in and back out of it in ten seconds when he took me on a tour.

  Life on an army base is insular, and the chain of command extends to the wives. I was an officer’s wife, albeit the lowest ranking officer, and I learned I was supposed to act like it. Officers got better everything—housing, food, all kinds of things—than the enlisted men. I knew no one, of course, but we were expected to go to parties for the officers whether we wanted to or not, and I had to go to teas and luncheons and events for the wives, which was fine, but I didn’t seem to meet anyone who was girlfriend material. At one of these first parties we were at the colonel’s house, standing outside beside a shimmery blue swimming pool, and a waiter in a white coat was passing around a tray of pretty juice drinks with fruit and little umbrellas stuck in them. It was a warm night and I was thirsty, so I took one, and it tasted pretty good. Nervous and trying to make conversation with the older officers, I drank it down quickly, and the waiter was right there on the spot and handed me a second. I was beginning to feel pretty relaxed for some reason and didn’t really want it, but took it to be gracious and sipped it.

  About halfway through the second drink, I began to get dizzy and sleepy, and I remember thinking how nice it would be to lie down, just for a minute, and take a little nap on the cool tile beside the pool. The next thing I remember is Larry carrying me into our house over his shoulder. He was so humiliated, and I can’t remember what he did or how he explained it, but I hope the one thing he didn’t say was the truth, “My wife has never tasted alcohol in her life, and she’s an idiot. Sorry.” I really, truly, hadn’t known there was alcohol in the drink. Isn’t that sad? At the wives’ teas, there was sometimes tart white wine, and I had a little, pretending to drink it but mostly just holding the glass. One of the ladies once put fresh cut peaches into the glasses, which made the wine sweeter and more palatable. I had done so many bad things, I was past the point of worrying about sin, and never even pretended to look for a church, as my father kept asking me to do, so what was the harm in having a glass of wine?

  Larry had to get up at five in order to be at work by six, and I had nothing to do all day, so I slept late, had breakfast, cleaned the small house, and then either drove aimlessly around trying to get a handle on the area or walked the aisles of the PX or the mall and poked around in stores. I had made no friends; it seemed hard to find any outside the social functions. And Larry was gone all day. At night he would come home, tired and down. We would eat dinner, watch TV for a short while, and go to bed, since he had to get up so early. He was having a hard time adjusting to the job, and occasionally he got migraines. I didn’t notice it as much before we got married, but at times he would seem blue for days or weeks on end, and then for no apparent reason he would snap out of it and be his old funny, chipper self again. Once, back when we were dating, we were watching Green Acres during one of these times, and he started laughing. Afterward he was cheery, like nothing harsher than rain had ever fallen on his head.

  I’m sure his job made it worse. He had a lot of responsibility on his young shoulders as the leader of a platoon of soldiers and tanks, and he knew that he would be headed to Vietnam in a few months, where he would be responsible for the lives of his men. But while he was working things through, I was going quietly stir-crazy. We never went out to a movie or to eat. He was too tired to even talk much. We rarely had sex.

  Then the phone rang one day and it was Edmond. We began to talk frequently, and the more detached Larry got, the more I began to miss home. I knew more clearly every day that I’d made a terrible mistake getting married. I began to think more and more about Edmond. He told me he was finishing up the centennial and would be going to Missouri next, and if I wanted to come back, I could go with him.

  Obviously I couldn’t tell Larry the truth, so I just told him I wanted to go back home for a visit. He said fine, perhaps with relief, and I got on the bus. I didn’t know what would happen on the other end, but I couldn’t wait to get away from where I was, the small gray and chalk-white house with roaches, TV, and the boredom of the mall.

  It was a bright, sunny day, I was full of nervous anticipation, I had a good book to read—Mary Stewart’s new book about Merlin, The Crystal Cave—and I felt like I’d been let out of a cage. Then somewhere between Clarksville, Tennessee, and Nashville the bus conked out. We sat on the side of the road for a couple of hours until somebody came and fixed it. I called Edmond and told him I was going to be late. He said not to worry, that he’d be at the Little Rock bus station, where we had arranged to meet. We made it to Memphis before the bus broke down again. It was hot and muggy, it was late, and we were still more than three hours from Little Rock.

  The Memphis bus station had to have been built off the blueprints for purgatory. The lights were dim fluorescent, making everyone look wan and sick. There were people who, I assumed
, lived there—unwashed, with greasy hair, nasty clothes, and rusty ankles. Several slept soundly on the benches, not moving as my fellow passengers and I shuffled in. I was wearing a yellow voile dress that had wilted and glued itself to my sweaty skin hours before. My Arrid had given out some time ago, too, and I smelled like a skunk. It didn’t really matter, because everyone smelled like that, or worse. One of the drunk men kept coming over to talk to me with breath that would melt mascara, trying to get me to go out with him for a drink. I huddled on my bench, attempting to ignore him, and finally he went away.

  I called Edmond again and told him it was going to be later. The clock ticked on and I had to call again. It was going to be later. And later. Until finally they said the bus was fixed and we would arrive at three in the morning.

  Edmond was worn out with the waiting, but good-natured about it, and when we rolled in, he was there with his yellow glasses waiting for me. He gave me one of those great kisses, and we went to a little dump of a motel near the bus station. It was dark and I was exhausted from the trip. I don’t know how he stood the smell of me, but he didn’t want to wait for me to take a shower, so we went in, stripped down, and did the deed in the first five minutes we were inside the room. It was exactly like the first time. Maybe it was worse, because I was so tired and conscious of how sweaty and bad I smelled. I fell into the rough sheets, passed out, and the next morning we showered and tried again, but we both realized there was no magic there. We packed our bags, went out into the bright sunshine, and to my horror we were right across the street from the construction project my father was working on. He was running a crane, and I looked up and saw a tiny figure in the cab of the machine. I jumped into the car, terrified he had caught a glimpse of my bright red hair, and off we went.