A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Edmond tried hard to make a fun day out of it. We went to breakfast, and then he took me to the zoo, but the sad animals lying on concrete floors, panting in the heat behind bars, were so depressing. I knew how they felt. We had lunch, and then I asked him to drop me off at the bus station. I called my mother and told her I was coming home and would tell her all about it when I got there. She was in total shock, so I didn’t linger on the phone. Edmond and I had a final (great) kiss, and I waved goodbye at the departing candy-apple-red VW bug—same year as my green one, which I had once seen as some kind of portent, now meaningless—trundling up the road toward Missouri. We had never once mentioned my going with him.

  Of course, everyone in Atkins was stunned that I was back, but in spite of the circumstances, I knew more than ever that I didn’t want to be married. I called Larry and told him I wasn’t coming back. He got right into the car (I have no idea how he managed to get away from his duties so quickly) and drove straight to Atkins. Everyone said, “Give it a chance,” “You’ve only been married a few months,” “All newlyweds are like this in the beginning,” “He loves you so much, you love him so much,” and so on. But the main reason I decided to stay with him was because he convinced me that he loved me and wanted me back. He really did want to be married to me. He hadn’t been coerced into it.

  So we went back to Fort Campbell, and things were a lot better. I guess my leaving snapped him out of his funk, and we began to go out, make friends, and have fun. A couple moved into the other side of our house and I had a girlfriend to hang out with. I was so grateful that I hadn’t ruined my life by running away with the wrong man, and grateful that no one ever knew about my near disaster. (Except now everyone knows.) I vowed to do better, to become a better wife and Christian. I rededicated my life to Jesus. (The great thing about Freewill Baptists is that you can sin and then rededicate and you are shiny clean and new, like a slightly used car that has been detailed.) I was determined to be the best wife ever. And for a while I was.

  Eight

  It was December and we were home. Larry was shipping out for Vietnam five days before Christmas, and we were trying to make it as festive as we could, splitting our time between my parents’ house and his parents’ house. He was one of nine children, and all of his siblings had come home to say goodbye to him. (His mother had had change of life babies, Larry and his twin sister, Linda, when she was forty-five, so Larry had nieces and nephews older than he was.) We had a big raucous dinner, and after we had cleaned up the kitchen and laughed and talked for a while longer, his older sister from Virginia and her husband went—without a by-your-leave—and got into our bed! It was the only spare bedroom, and we had been using it. I don’t remember why we just didn’t tell them it was our room, or go on down to my parents’ place, but it was late and we didn’t, so Larry’s mother gave us quilts to make a bed on the floor in the living room, with several kids scattered around on couches.

  The floor was, well, a floor, and we had only a quilt or two between us and it. I was skinny, and my bones were digging hard into the linoleum. I could feel the bruises forming. I couldn’t find a place to even get comfortable, much less sleep. Then, for some insane reason, Larry decided to get amorous. I whispered, “No, the kids will hear,” but he had his mind made up, and I nearly strangled myself senseless keeping quiet, normally being somewhat of a screamer. I think that was the night I conceived our son, Matthew.

  The night before Larry left, we booked a room in the fanciest hotel in Little Rock, splurging more than we could afford. (It could have been that night, too, that I conceived. It was just a day or two later. Or it might have been another day around that time. He was going to Vietnam, after all.) I took him to the airport the next day, then drove back home alone to cry, watch Walter Cronkite, and write letters every night. In January, I went back to Tech to finish my junior year.

  In a couple of weeks, I began to feel odd things going on. My period didn’t come and my breasts were strangely tender. I waited it out for another week or so, and when the period still hadn’t come, I went to the doctor. Yes, dear reader, I was pregnant. At the exact minute I walked in the door from the doctor’s office, the phone rang. It was Larry, calling from Saigon to tell me he was okay. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. I have a little news myself. You’re going to be a daddy!” There was a long silence, and then I heard a thud as he dropped the phone.

  By good luck, my best friend Susan, who’d been my bridesmaid (and who looked good in blue), got pregnant two weeks after I did, and Aurora, my best friend at Tech, was already two months pregnant, so we all went through it together. (I gained the most weight.) I had a host of other friends from home and my art and English classes who were all there for me as well, not to mention the church.

  My favorite class was creative writing with a teacher named B. C. Hall, or Clarence, as we called him. It was in his class that I learned to write. He sat cross-legged on the desk, as cool and hip as could be, hair just that little bit too long, giving us words of wisdom through clouds of cigarette smoke and squinted eyes, in a languorous drawl that held us spellbound. (Teachers were allowed to smoke in those days, I think. Or, more likely, he just said “screw the rules.”) On one of my stories, he wrote, “What’s an intelligent woman like you doing in a place like this?” I saved it and cherish it. We were friends until he died in 2005, and we wrote three screenplays together, two of which were optioned although not made. (Yet. I’m still an optimist.) It was in that class that I started writing stories that turned into my first novel, Windchill Summer, twenty-nine years later, a story about boys going to Vietnam and the toll it took on them and everyone close to them.

  In class, I sat between a couple of hippie guys named Matthew and Larry, who were always under surveillance for being the typical long-haired peace-symbol-wearing dopers. Matthew had the longest hair of anybody at school, a droopy blond George Custer mustache, and little round John Lennon glasses. He walked with an odd bounce up onto his toes with every step, which reminded me of Bugs Bunny. Matthew and Larry of course smoked pot, which was still exotic to most of the kids, and owned a head shop called the Family Hand, which had a black light room with psychedelic posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and others on the walls. In the middle was a giant water bed, where you could lie and float and pass some groovy hours. They felt sorry for me, since my husband was in the hated war, and adopted me and brought me milk to drink in class so I’d be healthy. If I had a couple of hours to kill, they insisted I go over to the shop and take a nap on the cool undulating water bed. I liked it so much I later got myself one.

  I was hungry all the time and nervous with the strain of the war and the pregnancy. By the end, I had gained sixty-five pounds. Once when I was in a Taco Bell, a guy who had been in one of my classes the previous year came up and asked me if I had a sister. I said no, and he said, “Are you sure? This girl looks a lot like you, except she’s thin.” I wanted to smear his face with my enchilada. What a moron. But it sadly brought home the fact that I was fat. As school let out and the summer hit like an open oven door, I was huge and miserable. No air conditioners back then. At least not in our house. I was obsessed with the war, and I knew that every letter I got from Larry had been written two weeks earlier, or more, so I had no idea how he was doing or where he was. They weren’t allowed to say, exactly, but he named places such as the Pineapple Forest, Arizona Territory, and Da Nang. He was also near the Laotian border, and every night on the news when any of those places were mentioned, I squinted to see if he was one of the soldiers pictured.

  I enrolled in summer classes in English, as I had every summer, to get a second teaching major. Then the fall semester started. I was the size of a blimp and totally miserable, waiting for my baby to arrive, sliding by my due date with no sign of labor. I had a night class in Asian art history with Mrs. Marshall, and one night I felt strange. This I announced to the class: “I feel strange.”

  “Go HOME!” they all yelled at m
e, in unison, but even though I was two weeks past my due date, I just didn’t think it was labor. I didn’t have any pains. So I stayed until class was over, everyone watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and soon after I got home my water broke and my mother said I had to go to the hospital. I still wasn’t sure I was in labor, and when we walked through the door, I said to the nurse that I was sorry, I thought I might be in labor but wasn’t sure since I wasn’t in pain. I was afraid she would scold me and send me back home. She slapped me down on the table, laughed, assured me I would have some pains, and then stuck me with a big needle full of painkillers. That’s what they did to ignorant twenty-two-year-old girls in 1971. They didn’t even ask me if I wanted to do a natural birth. Why would anybody want to do that? That’s why God invented morphine.

  The labor went on for eight hours. I was groggy the whole time and don’t remember much. I had brought my art history book thinking I would study for a test. Can you believe it? I do seem to remember floating penises in the pictures of the ruins at Angkor Wat—which frankly I wasn’t interested in at that point—and a lot of Buddhas, but not much else.

  At one point they gave me an enema, and just as I sat down on the pot beside the bed, the entire ladies’ auxiliary of the church trooped in with their flowered dresses and big smiles to give me their support. I screamed at them, “Get out of here!” and threw toilet paper rolls at them, poor things. They scurried away, and I felt bad, but really—this Christian business of visiting the sick is just too much. The sick just want to be left alone to fart at will, or to get up in a backless johnny with their butts exposed and go to the bathroom without having to entertain somebody who is underfoot praying over them.

  I had a spinal for the last big pain, and they whisked my baby boy away before I had a glimpse of him, because he had mucus in his lungs that had to be suctioned (he was probably zonked out on the painkillers, too, poor baby), and then I passed out. So I don’t remember seeing him until later, when I went to the incubator, and there he was, the spitting image of Larry. At least people could stop counting on their fingers the months Larry had been away. He was so beautiful—lots of dark hair, an adorable little monkey face, and he was huge! Nine pounds, with rosy cheeks hanging like ripe peaches. My friends Matthew and Larry from creative writing class bounced in to congratulate me, totally stoned, and were like, “Cool! Awesome, man! Look at his little toesies!” when they saw him. The nurses’ eyes were the size of dessert plates. Obviously, I hadn’t had a husband there with me, so I’m sure they were whispering, “I wonder which one the daddy is. I wonder if she knows.” I named him Matthew Davis, but not because of my friend. Larry and I had already picked out the name before I’d even met Matthew in class, but it was a nice coincidence, the Matthew and Larry thing.

  By October 1971, Nixon had started to withdraw some of the troops early, and Larry got to come home two months ahead of schedule. I met him at the airport, and I truly don’t think he recognized me. The look on his face still haunts me, as if he were looking at a not particularly attractive girl and then realized it was me. Matthew was six weeks old at this point, and I was still carrying around a lot of the baby weight and had cut my boob-length auburn hair into a Jane Fonda shag because it was so hot and miserable. We were happy to see each other, it goes without saying, but a little like strangers for a while, as if we were acquaintances who had bumped into each other at the airport and started a romance. Matthew was the biggest thing in my world, and Larry had seen only pictures of him. We had to remake our life together.

  We moved to Perryville, about thirty miles from Atkins, where Larry got a job teaching physics in the high school. I was doing my practice teaching in the art department at Subiaco Catholic Boys’ Academy, fifty or sixty miles in the opposite direction over winding country roads, and it was just too tough a commute for me, so before we had time to even hang curtains, we moved back to Atkins, which was in the middle, and we each had a commute. I dropped the baby off with my mother—bless her sweet heart—in the morning and picked him up in the afternoon. Matthew had big serious brown eyes, and he was precocious at everything. He walked at ten months, and I took him off the bottle at a year, as he was eating and drinking from a cup. I was so harried I wanted to make things happen as fast and as easily as possible. Looking back, I’m sorry I did that. Babyhood goes by so quickly that I wish I had just taken the time and let him be a baby instead of pushing him to be a big boy.

  Being a working mother, I never got enough sleep. I remember rocking Matthew all night and crying, saying, “Please, Matthew, just go to sleep for an hour. Let me get just one hour’s rest before I have to go to work.” Sometimes we had to put him in the car in the middle of the night and drive him around so he would go to sleep. But while he wasn’t a great sleeper, he was a great eater. He could eat four eggs at a time if I would give them to him. Once, though, he was taking such a long time getting the eggs down that I lost patience and, late for school, started rushing him, cramming in the spoonfuls as he slowly and carefully chewed and swallowed. After he ate the whole plate of eggs, he leaned over and spat out three paper clips. I nearly fainted, thinking of how close I had come to choking him. I tried to have more patience after that.

  I finally lost the weight, my hair grew back, and life settled down a bit for us. After graduation, I got an art teaching job in Clarksville, which was about twenty miles from Atkins, and Larry decided he wanted to do something other than teach that brought in more money, so he got a job selling insurance, which put him on the road a lot.

  Baby Matthew and Larry.

  It was during this time, when I was all by myself, exhausted from lack of sleep and harried from working, taking care of the baby, and dealing with the minutiae of life, when a little voice whispered in my ear, telling me I had missed the parade.

  Nine

  In Clarksville, I was assigned to teach lower-school art in the morning, then a seventh-grade English class before lunch, and in the afternoons I drove to the high school, where I taught art. The only thing I enjoyed was the high school. English class was my least favorite. Seventh graders are at that curious age when they are still children but hormones are hijacking their bodies. Some of the boys had a crush on me, some saw me as the enemy; some of the girls were bored, some thought I was cool. Nobody had the foggiest idea what a noun or verb was, and none of them wanted to find out. I was also from time to time a surrogate mother to them. One girl was quietly crying during class, and when I asked her to stay after and talk to me, I learned she had kissed a boy, he had put his tongue into her mouth, and she was terrified she was pregnant. I gave her a quick lesson on how the body reproduces, and she was much relieved.

  I was only four or five years older than some of my high school students, and it was difficult to maintain the teacher-student relationship. I have former students who became lifelong friends whom I still see today, thirty-seven years later. For most of them, art was a blast, a break from “real” classes. I would do a demonstration of, say, printmaking and pass out the supplies, then they would start their own versions, with me walking around the room making suggestions when they needed it but never actually laying hands on their work—the first sacred rule of teaching art. We did weaving and stitchery (everyone wanted to embroider something on their bell-bottom jeans and denim jackets), copper enameling, sculpture in various mediums, and, of course, drawing and painting. We worked a lot in clay, sculpting, hand building, and throwing pots on the wheel.

  Our budget was limited and we were always trying to find ways to do things on the cheap. We combed the garbage dump searching for treasures to use for sculptures or to stamp into interesting shapes on clay, or for printmaking. We went to the lumberyard to get scraps of Masonite or wood to paint on or to use for sculpture. We went to the grocery store dumpster for scavenged cardboard, egg cartons, or vegetables and fruit past their prime to use as printing stamps. (Did you know that the cut end of a bunch of celery is a perfect rose?) With old newspapers and wallpaper
paste we made giant papier-mâché sculptures, animals mostly.

  When one of the girls and I took our huge baby elephant to an art show in Little Rock in the back of a Ford Ranchero, the rope broke and the elephant flew out of the truck bed like Dumbo. Two state troopers passing by thought it was a foreign car rolling down the highway, turned, and chased after it, sirens blaring. They were most helpful, catching it and tying it securely back down for us, but we had to find a store that was open on Sunday, buy paint and paste, and do some quick repairs before the show.

  I announced on the first day of class that there would be no written tests, just a display of student work twice a semester, which elicited cheers, and I brought a cassette player to class so they could work to music, as we had done in college. The music made for a cheery, fun atmosphere, and a lot more work got done. The superintendent—we’ll call him Mr. Birch—didn’t like my methods at all and was constantly coming into class, telling me to turn off the music and make the kids sit quietly in their seats, which was impossible if they were working. We had a constant battle going on, but I was the hero to the kids, who were my coconspirators. One of them was always on the lookout, and when we saw Mr. Birch sneaking down the hall, we would quickly turn off the music and sit in our seats. It was a great game to the kids.

  The only problem in my life, looming ever larger, was that more than ever I didn’t want to be married. Larry and I had grown apart after he’d gotten home. For me, there was the stress of working and taking care of the baby—along with housekeeping, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, paying bills, servicing the car, and never getting enough sleep. As for Larry, he was on the road several days a week, and his unhappiness at doing yet another job he didn’t like took its toll. He was not a natural salesman. He didn’t have the gregarious kind of personality it required; he had to force himself to get up and do it every day. He hated everything about it—the travel, being away from home, the phoniness of it all. Not to mention the memories he brought back with him from Vietnam, which he seldom spoke about. He had been quietly and deeply affected by the cruelty, brutality, and indifference to life over there, and the few details he shared with me were more than I needed to know. He told me of one incident that nearly cost a lot of people their lives, including his.