by John Bloom
Candy gravitated to the older kids right away, perhaps because she had no trace of shyness and always liked boys’ games, even when her mother would scold her for getting her clothes dirty. In kindergarten, she was already flirtatious, trying to attract the attentions of a classmate named Steven who brought Graham crackers to school every day. Candy would watch his temples move as he ate them; it made him look nice, she thought. Once, when a nine-year-old named Johnny was spending the night, she challenged him to a race: whoever got to the water pump first got to pump the handle until a big glass jar was filled. Johnny, bigger and faster than Candy, was off right away and won easily, but as soon as Candy caught up she grabbed the jar from him and smashed it against the pump in rage. One piece of glass hit the top of Candy’s nose, right between the eyes, and blood started to pour. By the time they got her to the local hospital, she was kicking and screaming so much that she had to be held down by nurses. Her mother seemed put out with her, placing her forefinger to her lip and saying, “What will the people in the waiting room think?” But Candy kept screaming until all the stitches were in. She would bear the scar the rest of her life, but she would try to forget the race. It was something ugly in such a pretty place. She preferred to remember France as her happiest time.
Candy was an Army brat, the daughter of a radar technician who spent the twenty years after World War II bouncing from base to base, putting in two- or three-year stretches, trying to keep some thread of continuity in the lives of his two daughters, destined to attend six or seven schools in as many places before high school graduation. First there was Fort Gordon, then Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, followed by the three years in France, then Virginia, El Paso, West Germany, Washington, D.C., Fort Meade in Maryland—after a while the places all ran together and seemed like a very small town that happens to be scattered over half the globe. Candy seemed born to the wandering life, though, blessed with an easy rapport with strangers and the sort of coquettish exuberance that taught her at a very early age what power women could exert over men. In the fifth grade she was showered with bracelets by an impetuous admirer; in the sixth she felt her greatest embarrassment when a friend wrote “Donnie Loves Candy” all over the blackboard during recess. Her first kiss came from a guy with the improbable name of Jack Spratt; it happened one night outside the base Teen Center somewhere in rural Germany after an eighth-grade Coke dance. But Jack, like most boys she knew, soon had to leave, and she would have started going steady with Jack’s best friend had it not been for her mother’s stern admonition that she was too young for any such thing.
Candy learned most of what she knew of sex from Joy, her older sister, who traded secret knowledge in giggling, whispered confidences and showed Candy how to use exotic paraphernalia like lipstick and nylons. Candy wanted to know everything, and learned it soon enough. By the time both girls were teenagers, and the Wheeler household started filling up with a constant stream of homesick GI’s, Mrs. Wheeler decided it was time for preventive education and gave Candy a book on sex to read. The information was superfluous by that time, but Candy was troubled by the terminology. “Any questions?” asked her mother when she had finished.
“No,” she said honestly, “but what’s a penis?”
After a transfer back to a base in Maryland, conversations between mother and daughter became more strained. When Candy turned thirteen, she told her mother she wanted to wear a girdle. You don’t need one, her mother told her. I don’t care, said Candy, everybody is wearing them. That’s silly, said her mother. I need one to hold up my stockings, she said. You don’t need those either, came the reply. But Candy wouldn’t give up, arguing and protesting in ways that only made her mother more adamant. Finally Joy intervened on Candy’s behalf and talked their mother into a girdle. By the time she got it, though, Candy didn’t feel too grateful, knowing that there would be more and tougher fights.
At the age of fourteen she ran away from home. She had no particular reason, but her best friend Chloe had had a fight with her father, so the two of them met at the base Teen Club one night after a roller-skating party and decided to see the world together. They set off on foot, only to be found the following day at a nearby shopping center. Candy was hungry, but otherwise she had no regrets.
She despised school, because it was boring and because no particular subject ever seemed to get her attention. At sixteen she became a full-time loiterer, spending most weekends sitting at fast-food joints, cruising, playing pool, drinking beer (though without ever developing a taste for it), telling what she believed to be dirty jokes, and especially hanging out at the base rifle range late at night, where boys’ hands were sometimes known to wander underneath girls’ dresses. Candy was curious and aggressive, anxious to try anything, but sometimes that was difficult. Since she had started school a year early, Candy was the baby of the rifle-range crowd—the last of the girls to start having her period and, worse yet, the last to be allowed to “car-date.” She continued to quarrel frequently with her mother—over dating, makeup (she wasn’t allowed to wear it to school), the telephone (Candy remained glued to it for hours on end), and especially smoking. Both parents smoked but didn’t want her to start. Finally, after several mother-daughter spats, her father—always the pushover when it came to his “baby girls”—said it wasn’t that important, not if they were going to be fighting all the time, and gave her permission to do it. She immediately stopped smoking.
Still, until she was a high school junior, the most daring thing Candy had done was go skinnydipping late at night, with and without males, whenever the girls in her group could sneak out their windows without getting caught. That kind of suggestive but innocent fun all changed when her best friend got pregnant and had to leave school. Upset more by her girlfriend’s keeping it a secret than by the pregnancy itself, Candy set her sights on her first steady boyfriend. The magic “car-dating” age of sixteen had arrived, and Candy was tired of spending all her time with the girls.
His name was Chris, and he was one of the senior-class “darlings” that all the junior girls drooled over. He was the first thing in Candy’s life that seemed to matter. As Candy would later say, “I fell madly in love with him.” She couldn’t wait to lose her virginity.
“We had dated for a couple of months before I went to bed with him,” she would recall. “Actually, went to car with him would be more appropriate, since it was the back seat of his Ford. I was very disappointed. From all the trashy novels I’d read, I expected fireworks and explosions and to be all aquiver with lust. I had certainly wanted him before he actually entered me, but afterwards was a big letdown. Oh, it felt good, and it didn’t hurt like I had expected it to, but it didn’t feel as good as I thought it should. I wondered afterwards if my eyes were all glassy and my cheeks rosy like in the novels. It got better, though, as time went on, and we became more experienced and experimental with each other. I don’t think Chris ever felt guilty for having done it, and I knew I didn’t. We were in love and it seemed a natural course. And yet it was something that we kept very private. Some of our friends copulated more openly and that Chris was so quiet about it pleased me. It put our relationship above that of our friends. The Christmas after my senior year Chris wanted to give me an engagement ring and my mother wouldn’t allow him to. Daddy at this time had been sent to an isolated base in Alaska, Mama and I were both working, and she felt I was too young. She always ‘felt I was too young’ for everything, it seemed. I guess she was right, though. When Daddy came home, he was sent to Illinois. I was in California at the time with my sister—she had been having a difficult pregnancy and miscarried while I was there. But rather than going back to Maryland to marry Chris, I went to Illinois. I guess I thought I was too young, too. Soon, Chris and I didn’t even write anymore.”
Pat Montgomery met her one summer in El Paso, a summer so crowded with images of love and death that in later years he would have trouble piecing them all together. For much of that summer he sat in the lab at Texas Ins
truments, staring at his pallid scientific theorems without the least interest, his mind eight hundred miles away. Pat Montgomery was one of the brightest young electrical engineers in one of the fastest-moving American electronics companies, and for several years he had told himself that was all he wanted in life. For a while he just about gave up on women, and the only times he went out now were when somebody fixed him up. He lived in a Dallas singles apartment—his buddies at the lab talked him into it—where everyone was supposed to have such a great sex life. But all Pat ever seemed to do was go to movies he didn’t want to see with nice young schoolteachers he didn’t like; they were all polite but intimidating women whom he would leave at the doorstep after a nervous pause and an awkward kiss. Afterward he would go home and feel foolish. They were all like the women his mother tried to set him up with—nice but not his type. It was all fake, Pat decided. Who needs it? Then Pat took a week off to go fishing with his father in Arizona, and when they got back to El Paso his mother had done it again. “She’s a very nice girl I met at work,” was all she said. Great, thought Pat. One of the women at the furniture factory. Then he thought, what the hell? And that’s how Pat met Candy Wheeler.
She was petite and blonde and a little impish, with a thin pointed nose and a contagious high-pitched laugh. But Pat didn’t notice those things until later. When she opened the door to her apartment, he thought two things: overweight and a double chin. Typical mother’s choice. Not his type. Fake date.
He took her across the river to Adrian’s, one of the nicest restaurants in Juarez, and tried to make conversation, but Pat honestly didn’t know how to “make conversation.” Later Candy would describe it, with characteristic candor, as the dullest date in her life. Mostly she listened to Pat talk about his childhood, especially his memories of the trips he made with his uncle out to the sand dunes southeast of El Paso. Candy had enough interest in “paperback archeology” to keep up with his description of some old Indian ruins, but mostly she just wanted it to be over. On the way to a shopping mall to see Airport afterwards, Candy tried to fill the awkward silences.
“My mother told me you wanted to be a doctor.”
Pat nodded.
“Well, you must really like to work with your hands.”
Pat explained that he wanted a Ph.D., not an M.D., and then he tried to explain what electromagnetics is.
Candy was in a holding pattern when she met Pat Montgomery. After Chris, she had altered her ambitions a bit, especially after a brief stint doing secretarial work for the National Security Agency. It was even more boring than high school. What she needed, Candy decided, was a husband. Candy had always assumed she would be a mother but rarely thought of being a wife. In her favorite childhood fantasy, she lived on a great country farm full of animals and children (“at least eight children,” she said in later years), and yet there was no man in her dream vision. “I don’t know how I intended to have those children,” she said, “since I never thought about husbands.” Nevertheless, she scouted around from time to time, beginning in January 1970 when, at the age of twenty, she moved out of her parents’ house for the first time, rented a duplex, got a secretarial job at the El Paso Times, and dated successively a man named Fred (ruled out due to poor income level), a guy named Dave (ruled out for lack of education), and one whose name she could never remember. (She did seriously consider marrying the one whose name she couldn’t remember, but only because his best friend had married Candy’s best friend, Cathy. “It seemed the natural thing to do at the time,” she said later.) Then Cathy moved away, and Candy took up with a Mexican-American girl named Frances, whose fondness for tennis, movies, shopping, wasting time at the Fort Bliss Service Club, and bar-hopping in Juarez perfectly agreed with Candy’s own. The two of them were especially taken with a Juarez emporium called Pete’s, where Pete himself would mix exotic but relatively harmless Purple Passions just for them. Candy’s mother constantly warned her not to have anything to do with Frances’ Mexican boyfriends, a warning that went unheeded after Candy got her duplex, not because Candy had any great fondness for Mexican men but because she considered her mother’s opinion hypocritical. Mrs. Wheeler’s dating code didn’t proscribe Frances from dating Anglo men.
Nevertheless, the last place Candy would have expected to find herself was in a car on the way to a movie with a guy like Pat Montgomery. It had happened through no fault of her own. Forced to change jobs to meet her rent payment, Candy became the secretary to an undemanding but wealthy owner of a wrought-iron furniture manufacturing plant. The most intriguing routine of a most unintriguing job was to total up the piecework of the many women day laborers who sewed the cushions for padded headboards, barstools, and the like. Over the roar of the foundry, she managed to make friends with two of them, Marie Montgomery and Trudy Temple, who turned out to be, respectively, Pat’s mother and aunt. One day Marie called over the din to tell Candy her son was coming home for a vacation and that, since all his friends had moved away from home, she wondered if Candy would mind if he called her. Candy wasn’t breathless with anticipation. “But I thought, well, I can always get a free meal out of him.”
Her biggest surprise was not Pat himself—he was not handsome but she had dated worse—but the fact that, after their excruciating first date, he asked her immediately for a second. She surprised herself by accepting.
On the day following the abortive first date, they drove out into the desert, looking for an old adobe house Pat had discovered as a child. But Pat made a wrong turn and got lost and they ended up walking up and down across the sand dunes, hand in hand, until the sun touched the horizon and they both remarked how beautiful it was. Candy scampered playfully across the side of the dune and then complained about the sand in her red hot pants.
On the way back into town, they stopped for pizza, then took in a drive-in movie. Candy would later tell Cathy that “Pat likes to work with his hands after all.” It was a problem she could deal with, and did. Having put him in his place, she turned back to the movie and acted like nothing had happened. Pat never mentioned it either, but before taking her home, he asked if they could make it three nights in a row.
Candy told Pat to call her the next day. She had no intention of ever going out with him again.
There was no reason to think anything else would happen. On the day after their frolic in the dunes, Candy purposely avoided going home after work, choosing to visit her mother instead. Pat called all night but got no answer. She had washed her hands of him, a fact that Pat failed to realize. He assumed she had simply forgotten about the date, or been called away to some family emergency. It never crossed his mind that she had brushed him off.
Though she was five years his junior, Candy had the worldly wisdom of a much older woman, while Pat in some ways was still as naive as a high school sophomore. Had Pat been more observant and realized that he had been snubbed, he might have disappeared. Instead, when he got back to Dallas he sent her a dozen roses and a humorous card. Inside he had written, “Hope you got the sand out of your pants!” Candy was so touched that she looked up the number for Texas Instruments and called to tell him how sweet he was.
Pat’s father was older than the other dads of the Lower Valley. He had married late, so that by the time Pat was a teenager, Jewel Montgomery was nearing the end of his career as comptroller of a small Texaco refinery. In some ways Pat was closer to his uncle Jack, who lived next door and treated Pat like a son, taking him on expeditions into the desert, hunting, camping, and doing all the athletic things that Mr. Montgomery was too frail and asthmatic to attempt. Then one morning in July 1970 Jack suddenly suffered a massive heart attack and died at home before anyone could get to the house. Pat flew home immediately. Jack was only fifty-four.
Pat had been looking for a reason to return to El Paso, but when he got there for the funeral, he was distracted and confused. On the second night home, he called Candy and met her at her apartment. For the next several hours they walked through a nearby park
, and for one of the few times in his life, Pat forgot his shyness and talked unstintingly of both his sense of loss—Jack was the first close relative of Pat’s to die—and his great hopes for a career in advanced engineering. Somehow, in the way that great tragedies and great victories become compressed and focused in a single moment, the sympathetic, attentive face of Candy Wheeler became that night a symbol for Pat of the fond future in the way that Jack now represented the fond past. And Candy was so taken with his soliloquy that she saw through to a man whom she had not even recognized on the first two dates. He seemed so clever and cute and, above all, generous that she wondered whether this could possibly be the same man who had been so boorish at the drive-in movie.
It wasn’t that Pat said anything so very original. The whole of his prior life centered around schools, beginning with Ysleta High, where he was an All-City trumpeter and a straight-A student; Texas Western, the local university where he had to give up hopes of being a professional musician and turn to engineering instead; and finally the University of Colorado on a NASA fellowship. He would have been there still, working on his Ph.D., had it not been for President Nixon’s suspension of student draft deferments. Fearing Vietnam even more than he feared a blind date, Pat had taken a job in the Texas Instruments antenna lab, where it was simple to prove to any draft board that the work contributed to the military effort. In fact, Pat was so far ahead of the technical journals by that time, on the very cutting edge of electromagnetic research, that the University of Colorado decided to allow him to supervise his own Ph.D. work for a while, at least until the draft ended and he was able to return for the mandatory campus hours.