by Sarah Smarsh
At Betty and Arnie’s farmhouse, just past the sliding glass door that led from the pool and cement patio into the dining room, sat an out-of-tune console piano. Somehow Grandma and Grandpa had come into it for free. When I touched the keys, I had such a strong feeling that it was a natural instrument for me that the frustration was almost physically painful in my hands. The swimming pool felt like that, too. I’d become a swimmer in adulthood, but as a kid I never had lessons, which would have been an ordeal for my family in both logistics and finances.
The frustrations of rural life were all about opportunity and proximity. In the pool, at the piano, I felt the agony of potential energy without the training that might release it into breaststrokes and melodies. It was something like the agony I sensed in my mother and Grandma Teresa.
School was my best bet for relieving that sort of frustration, even though it wasn’t always a hospitable place for a poor kid whose mom wasn’t in the PTA. Cheney, population fifteen hundred, was ten miles of dirt roads and two-lane blacktops to the south. It was where Dad graduated from high school in 1973 and where, a few years later, Mom was so miserable from the small-town cliquishness that she dropped out and got her GED not long before I came along.
Early in the morning, I walked down our dirt driveway, which was longer than a city block. I waited at the end of it and stared at the corner where our dirt road ended at the lake dam. That’s where the bus would appear from behind the trees along the blacktop.
If it was cold, I prayed for the bus to come and shoved sometimes ungloved hands wherever I had warmth. Once the bus arrived, being short, I struggled to climb its tall steps. I took an empty seat. The journey smelled of sweaty plastic, and it was a long one. I was at the edge of the route, the first to get on and last to get off. On account of so many stops along muddy roads full of ruts, often winding far off course to reach isolated rural homes, the ride took upwards of an hour each way.
I loved school for the learning, the activities, having things I made hung in hallways, the chance to be around other kids. But even as I excelled at all those things, Cheney had never accepted my scandalously young Wichita mom and therefore never accepted me. Yes, most women had kids at a young age where we lived. But the difference between doing it as a teenager who got her GED and a twenty-three-year-old recent college grad who came back to town from a small state university with a ring on her finger was the difference between unacceptable and encouraged. There are pecking orders within pecking orders.
The few times Mom showed up at school for “room mother” duty, the other mothers would murmur to one another about how young she was or who was she trying to impress with that outfit, or they’d raise their eyebrows about how unnatural she seemed with children. Once she brought a plastic bowling set for toddlers from Matt’s toy box since that’s all we had in the house that a group of kids might be able to do together, and she couldn’t go buy something new. I could feel how embarrassed she was when the other moms laughed. It broke my heart worse than any embarrassment I’d ever felt myself.
Those realms of family and school rarely overlapped for me. My parents were often absent from this or that function due to work or not understanding its significance in my life, since it seemed to have proved insignificant in theirs. They didn’t ask whether I’d done my homework; I always had, and I had no idea a parent was expected to be involved. I don’t know if I was born that way or developed that way to fit my circumstances. But as far back as I can remember, there was an adult me inside the child me—which probably explains a lot about how I could sense you back then.
School was run by adults who seemed so different from the ones at home. They wore different kinds of clothes and spoke what was almost a different language. Even the logical order of daily operations seemed foreign to a child who so often knew chaos. I thrived there, whether anyone was rooting for me to do so or not. I wasn’t from a family or background anyone seemed to be rooting for. Our small town was almost entirely white, and in that context economics decided the social order.
My first-grade teacher, a short woman with permed hair in the shape of a triangle and a tall poof of bangs at the top, singled me out to verbally pick on, probably because I was both the most likely to talk back and the least likely to have a parent show up raising hell about how her kid was treated. There was a boy in our class who had a mental disability, and once I saw her yank him up from the floor by his hair.
I’d say something to object when she was unfair or mean. She’d send me to the hallway and remember the offense later when chocolate milk cartons and graham crackers got handed out and I had to apologize to get mine.
When unfit teachers occupy classrooms, certain children are most vulnerable—those with disabilities, who can’t convey mistreatment to their parents, and those whose parents are too negligent, too drunk, or too busy to ask how school is going.
Every day, the teacher gave me horrible looks that made me feel like I would die inside. If I was tired from no sleep and yawned, she’d leap at the chance to harass me.
“Sarah, does this bore you?”
“I was just yawning,” I’d say, and I’d be sent to the hallway for talking back. She sent me to the hallway just about every day in first grade, though I never had any trouble with other teachers and everyone always said I was a nice girl.
Once the teacher called me over during recess.
“Sarah, did you know you have a B in reading right now?”
This didn’t make sense. I’d gotten an A on every worksheet I could remember. I always got A’s and took nothing more seriously than my school assignments. I was worried and confused.
She was wearing big sunglasses and a trench coat in the cold. She had a little smile on her face. Sometimes when she pulled me aside, one of her eyes rolled back in her head like she was turning into a different person, which seemed about right because when parents were around she was nice as could be.
“I thought you were smarter than that, but you have a B,” she said and stuck her chin out. “I want you to think about that.”
While rural schools employed some fine teachers, in many cases they couldn’t be too picky. For decades, those school districts had been consolidating, unable to keep the lights on without pooling resources. Even schools that remained separate often shared teachers, who would drive half an hour from school to school to teach, say, music to the sixth graders of three different small towns in one day.
I craved learning so much that my teacher’s abuse never deterred me from trying my hardest on every assignment. In many ways related to my sensibilities, school was all I had. If it contained monsters, I would face them by necessity, without question. There was a sadness, though, in my so desperately needing something that could be gotten only in a difficult, even cruel way.
On long bus rides home from school, then, while other children played and screamed, I was quiet. I usually had one or two friends but had been established as a general outsider on the first day of kindergarten when I carried my school supplies in a paper grocery sack instead of a purple unicorn backpack. From that day on, while the other kids on the bus shouted and played and fought, I always sat alone and watched through the window: The mobile homes where, during the winter, children ran coatless to the bus’s accordion door. The bigger homes with horse stables and entry gates where children waited with their mothers. The wheat fields that changed from frozen sod to ankle-high grass to waving coats of gold.
When I got home, I’d drop my bag and walk past the tree row, past the two-lane blacktop highway, to the large state lake. I’d climb up the dam to the spillway, a monstrous release valve for the water. I’d cling to the tall metal fence around it, waiting for it to open. When it did, an enormity of gushing, gnashing water ripped into the deep concrete spillway, spraying me through the fence and electrifying me with adrenaline.
I cherished the quiet pleasure of life close to nature but was developin
g the same sort of tension that Mom, Grandma Teresa, and so many rural people carried—a feeling of containment, a desire to somehow rip free.
By early 1987, Grandma Betty had tired of the long drive between the courthouse in Wichita and the farm in the middle of nowhere. Grandpa Arnie said she could quit her job, but she didn’t want to quit. When had she not worked? She was proud of what she did at the courthouse.
“Plus,” she said, “I got used to the big money.”
She received a meager salary, accepted without negotiation, as were most women’s salaries. But living at the farm, she paid no rent or mortgage. A lot of what she earned went into savings, for the first time in her life, or to bail out a friend who needed help the way Betty herself had needed it not so long ago. She was tired of the long daily commute from the farm, but it made more sense, she thought, to keep her job and find a house in Wichita, which could be a long-term property investment anyhow. For all the moving in her past, and even her many years on the farm, Wichita was still her home.
I went along as she visited open houses. I liked the brown brick house with the glass coffee table.
“They want sixty thousand dollars for it,” Grandma Betty said. “That’s too high.”
Back home I told Mom, “We went to a house that costs sixty thousand dollars.”
“That’s not that much,” she said. “Some houses even cost a hundred thousand dollars.”
I spent the next week reporting this to anyone who would listen.
Grandma found a tiny, square house on Second Street near downtown Wichita, near both her childhood home and the Mexican American neighborhood where her lifelong best friend had grown up. Grandma’s new place was just a five-minute drive from her job at the courthouse. She would stay at the house during the week and spend weekends at the farm with Grandpa, she said. He agreed to drive to Wichita on weeknights after his chores, unless the farm kept him tied up late into the evening.
Grandma bought the house for $25,000 through an owner-carry mortgage with balloon payments, a good trick in which the seller makes the monthly payments for the first couple years until the buyer’s payments kick in and increase in amount over time. It’s like being carried by Jesus on a sandy beach and paying him interest for every footprint.
The yellow-orange brick house was built around the time Betty was born and had a concrete porch and four rooms: a small bedroom and living room with wood floors, and an eat-in kitchen with a small bathroom connected to it. To turn the unfinished basement into more space, Dad and Grandpa Arnie swung sledgehammers at a wall, and Matt and I picked up the chalky pieces to put in a garbage bag. We jumped on a mattress covered in powdery plaster on the cool cement floor, until Dad started the circular saw to cut studs and the noise drove us outside.
Second Street was busy with cars, and I kept Matt at a safe distance. I held his hand as we wandered a few blocks toward the old, tiny brick general store with a 7Up sign that read GEORGE’S. It was one of the last family-run grocers in town, and Grandma had walked there as a kid herself. George, who was a thousand years old, gave us candy out of a jar on the counter above us.
After supper at the new house, Matt went back to the country with our parents. Grandpa Arnie went back to the farm so he’d be there for early-morning chores. I stayed in Wichita with Grandma Betty to help clean her new house.
We scrubbed the kitchen floor, the counters, the stove and refrigerator. Grandma couldn’t believe how filthy somebody left the place. We scraped at the wallpaper, and Grandma couldn’t believe how many sloppy layers of wallpaper somebody left on the walls. I pried staples and tacks and nails from the drywall, then dipped a trowel in a plastic cup full of wet plaster to smear across dents and holes.
We had a tiny black-and-white television going, and when the ten o’clock news came on, Grandma was ready to hang it up. We were hungry, but the new house was empty. For supper, we’d eaten bologna sandwiches and potato “shoestrings” from a greasy metal can. Grandma drove us to McDonald’s and told me to get whatever I wanted. She often told me to get whatever I wanted when we went to fast-food restaurants, and I understood that her generosity was because of the hard life she had lived. She remembered what it felt like to be a kid who didn’t get to order what she wanted. I ordered a hot fudge sundae.
Back at the new house, we dragged a mattress and sheets into the living room, and she moved the television to the corner next to us. She fiddled with the tall antenna until I saw Johnny Carson. It felt like a great adventure to eat ice cream on a bare mattress, on the hardwood floor of an empty, echoing house, while watching The Tonight Show.
Grandma Betty switched off the TV and the lights.
“You done good work today, Sarah Smurf,” she said.
I had forgotten that darkness and quiet were not the same in Wichita as they were in the country. The cars seemed bright and loud, driving by just past the front door, which opened into the room where we lay. I thought and thought and thought like I did every night, until I wished my mind had a switch I could flip. I felt Grandma get up in the almost darkness.
She said she was going to go pee, and would I like a glass of water. She turned on the kitchen light and screamed.
“Oh, God. Sarah, get up.”
Hundreds of cockroaches ran across the kitchen linoleum in a big, dark swarm.
Hit by sudden light, some of them ran to the bathroom. Others scurried around the bottom of the refrigerator. Some ran toward the dark dining room and our mattress.
I stood up on the mattress and took a step back. A line of roaches started up the side of the mattress. Grandma was searching for her sandals.
“Those filthy bastards,” she said. “Get your stuff. We’re blowin’ this joint.”
Then it was after midnight and we were rolling down the familiar strip of Highway 54—stars, cattle, wheat fields that were wild prairie grass back when that same route west was called Cannonball Stage Coach Road. Grandma was cursing the cockroaches of the earth, wishing for spiders or June bugs but, by God, anything but a filthy cockroach because she hated those bastards.
Less than an hour later we were back in the country, climbing out of Grandma’s car to the sound of locusts and the smell of the pigs and cows that lay sleeping somewhere in the darkness. Grandma quieted Sasha, the German shepherd, as we walked through the warm night to the front door of the farmhouse. She always got a big glass of water with lots of ice, and we went up the familiar creaky old wood steps covered in nubby blue carpet.
“Shhh. We’ll scare Grandpa,” Betty said when we were halfway up the steps.
She winked at me from the bedroom door and took a great leap onto the waterbed, and Grandpa’s big belly went up with the jostling water mattress. He let out a startled yell, and Grandma and I laughed until our stomachs hurt.
“What in the hell are you doing here?”
Grandma lit a cigarette and used the big, boxy remote control to turn on the television, switching through four channels of late-night programming and picking, most likely, The Twilight Zone or the television series version of Nightmare on Elm Street, which gave me horrible dreams, though I never admitted it because I didn’t want her to feel bad. As a treat, Grandma gave me half a piece of the Nicorette gum she kept on the headboard for nights when she tried to quit smoking.
Once she and Grandpa Arnie were both asleep, I turned off the television and for hours it was the country air, Grandpa Arnie’s snoring, a distant headlight on a highway across a field, black darkness, the smell of menthol ointment that Arnie used at night for muscle aches and that Betty put up her nose when her sinuses swelled.
Whenever it was time for Grandma Betty to take me back to my parents, the thought of my mom’s mood filled me with dread. Grandma would cheer me up by being funny. “Time to hit it!” she’d say, and pinch me in the arm. “Let’s scram! Let’s blow this joint.”
Then we were in her little car
again, its ashtray full of butts, the cigarette lighter missing, the smell of smoke most powerful if it was summertime, a tiny dog in Grandma’s lap with its paws on the driver’s-side door and its tongue in the wind. In the glove box, a heap of napkins, ketchup packets, salt and pepper, moist towelettes, and plastic sporks left over from Wichita lunch-break trips to fast-food joints.
Grandma would yell “Goodbye!” to everything we passed. With her long, skinny left arm she waved madly out the window of her small car, her right hand managing both the steering wheel and a burning menthol cigarette.
“Goodbye, barn! Adios, garden! See you in the funny papers, mailbox!”
When we turned from the gravel driveway onto the dirt road, I tried not to laugh, wondering whether her performance was finished. She stayed quiet just long enough to worry me.
Silence.
Silence.
“GOODBYE, WHEAT FIELD! GOODBYE, CRAB APPLE TREES!”
She leaned from one side to the other as she yelled, yanking the steering wheel with her. The car veered so wildly toward the wheat on our left and the tree row on our right that it seemed we balanced on two tires. By this time, my face was red with laughter.
The farm shrank in a side-view mirror, dust rose behind the car, and Betty smiled in a swirl of cigarette smoke around her blond hair, which was lit by the country sun. She, my mom, and Grandma Teresa were all Wichita women who fell in love with farmers. But Betty was the only one of them who found her happiest home in the country, and in that way I was more like her than like any other woman who helped raise me.
I don’t know where your heart would have been happiest. The country was your birthright, but the older I get, the less I think what side of a divide you’re born on has much to do with who or what you are.