by Sarah Smarsh
Hoover’s campaign tapped local contractors, furnishers, and even Girl Scouts to put on information fairs in thousands of communities across the country, pushing suburban homeownership—a pursuit the government hoped would disperse foreign-born immigrants in congested urban dwellings teeming with potentially subversive ideas.
The federal initiative went bust with the great stock market crash of 1929. The newly unemployed and homeless were forced to live in shantytowns across the country called Hoovervilles. But today, thanks in large part to the private industries that benefit from it, the notion of homeownership in America remains romanticized in culture and encouraged by policy.
While she took many other jobs over the years to make ends meet, Mom maintained the real estate license she had studied for in the 1980s. Her career would track with the national housing boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. She specialized in finding affordable homes and negotiating mortgage tricks for low-income Wichitans with low credit scores. “Real estate” is an idea that connotes wealth in some places, but what Mom sold was a step from poverty toward the middle class.
In the ’90s, that was an honorable enough mission. Home values weren’t so inflated, and banks approved loans they knew borrowers could repay, if barely. Mom loved to hand house keys to young families moving out of crappy apartments. During the holidays, she led donation collections at her real estate agency and carefully chose gifts for a family referred by a local women’s shelter. I helped her wrap and deliver them out of the trunk of her car, which needed new brake pads she couldn’t afford.
She never talked about it, and I’d wager she didn’t even think about it, but the satisfaction Mom derived from putting people in houses had its origins in her own wildly unstable upbringing. Seeing what she’d seen, if she’d lived in the 1920s, she would have rolled her eyes at Hoover’s propaganda about security and homeownership.
About a home, Jeannie was surprisingly sentimental. She saved all manner of keepsakes in tubs for me and you both, without ever telling me she hoped that one day you would exist. About the housing market, though, she was the most cynical of realists. When she had to move for some reason or another—money, divorce, money again—she painted another wall maroon and never looked back.
Transience was my mother’s family’s way by necessity—in part because of poverty, and in part because of mental illness that went untreated, also a function of poverty. The two decades before I was born were the wildest years.
My great-grandmother’s clinically diagnosed schizophrenia flowered around the same time my mom was born, in the early ’60s. Dorothy had recently kicked out Joe, the factory worker Betty had beaten with a skillet. She was forty-one and pregnant with his child in her house that had now seen three husbands come and go.
“That was the downfall that pushed her over the edge,” Aunt Pud told me about this period, when her mother’s third divorce and midlife pregnancy collided. It was around then that Dorothy started getting distant looks in her yellow-green eyes and relocating impulsively with her kids in tow.
Dorothy was pregnant, restless, newly single, and ready to say to hell with the house and Wichita altogether. She had recently visited a distant cousin in rural Oklahoma and decided she liked it there. She would sell the house, where she’d raised her kids for over a decade, which Aaron had long ago signed over to her. She would open a restaurant in Oklahoma with the money.
After the house sold, while Dorothy was busy buying restaurant equipment, she and Betty, Pud, and baby Jeannie stayed down the street with Dorothy’s parents, Ed and Irene, whose house would be a landing place for years to come. In December, Dorothy gave birth to a baby girl, Polly. Then she had an explosive fight with her parents and, as planned, headed south for Oklahoma with the growing clan of females—Betty, eighteen; Pud, ten; Jeannie, one; Polly, an infant.
“That’s when the caravan started,” Pud told me.
In coming years, the tight group would bounce around the center of the country more times than any of them could count. As a young adult piecing it together, I had to dig up yellowed, postmarked letters and court records and make charts on walls just to map the dates and places—let alone what happened when and where, let alone why it might matter to me or to you.
First there was Pond Creek, Oklahoma, just south of the Kansas line. In the winter of 1963, Dorothy rented a building on the highway and opened a truck stop. Dorothy cooked, Betty waitressed, and Pud babysat the little ones whenever their shifts overlapped. At some point, Joe came down from Wichita and started strangling Dorothy—a memory relayed to me in the same nonchalant voice as mundane details about industrial kitchen equipment. To get free, Dorothy grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed Joe in the arm. It ended up being an unfortunate move altogether. The truck-stop restaurant failed, and Dorothy lost all the money from the house sale.
They all went back to Kansas to stay with Ed and Irene again. By the next spring, though, they’d left Wichita again, this time going past Oklahoma to Irving, Texas. They stayed with Carl, Betty’s brainy older brother, who had made good as an accountant after he got out of the military. Betty worked as a hostess at Kip’s Big Boy hamburger restaurant. Pud was in fifth grade and wanted to play the flute. Dorothy rented one for her, but after two lessons they were on the road again.
They must have had money troubles, because the whole brood left Texas within a few months and returned to Wichita to stay with Ed and Irene yet again. Pud was enrolled at the same elementary school for the third time in a single school year. She was embarrassed, she recalled. She couldn’t keep up with the schoolwork because she had missed so much of what the rest of the kids had studied.
Joe still came around hoping to win Dorothy back, but she was having none of it, having sworn off men altogether for being lousy sons of bitches. She said she would never date again, and she didn’t. Meanwhile, her paranoia was getting worse.
“She’d go off her trolley,” is how Betty would describe it.
Betty was the main target of Dorothy’s paranoid accusations. She was going behind her back about this or that, stealing money out of her purse, Dorothy said. In truth, Betty was the one who was trying to help her. She finally committed her mom to the state mental hospital in Larned, Kansas, a little town in the middle of the state.
When Dorothy got out, she decided to stay there to be near her doctors. She must have been stable enough to be released but not so stable that she felt comfortable losing proximity to health-care professionals she trusted, for the moment. She got an apartment near the hospital with Pud and Polly.
That was early 1965. Betty and Jeannie lived near downtown Wichita. Betty was still legally married to Ray but fell for a guy named Johnny, who was also separated from a spouse. Betty told him she was pregnant, even though she wasn’t. He left for California to find work and a great life to offer her, he claimed. He wrote love letters nearly every day for two weeks on pulled-apart used envelopes since he couldn’t afford to buy paper, let alone a bus ticket for Betty and Jeannie. Betty wrote to her mom and little sisters in the state hospital town:
I don’t know where your living but will send this as soon as I get your address. I am still working. Jeannie’s Baby Sitter lives across the Street. Thank you Pud for the necklace & the 1.00 & 25 cents for Jeannie. I like the necklace real well, it’s real pretty. I wear it everyday to work. We love & miss you all very much. Johnny is still in Calif. & I called him last night, he’ll be coming home Fri, I think. How are you getting along. Any prospects for jobs yet? I will try & get up to see you before I leave, if I can get a way up. John is working in a clothing store & he likes it pretty well. They say you can make a lot in Calif. I’m gona try & save as much as possible for my divorsee, I hope I can swing it.
That spring, Dorothy quit the hospital outpatient treatment in Larned and took Pud and Polly south again. They went back down to the red dirt, to Medford, Oklahoma. No one remembers why. That didn’t la
st long, of course. They rolled back into Wichita just as Betty was itching to roll out.
Johnny had gone back to his wife, and Betty wanted a change of scenery. So the whole bunch of females got in two cars and left town on a whim. Betty drove a Mercury that Dorothy had bought her with money earned at a restaurant in Texas.
“It was the coolest car,” Betty told me.
They stopped at a highway intersection.
“I don’t know if it was Mom or me, but one of us said, ‘Let’s go west,’” Betty said.
The Mercury broke down somewhere near Syracuse, Kansas. Betty hoofed it to a mechanic. The repairs would be boo-coo bucks. What were they gonna do with the goddamn Mercury?
“We just left it,” Betty said and laughed. She threw her stuff into Dorothy’s car and climbed in holding three-year-old Jeannie.
Dorothy’s car was running hot when they got to Limon, Colorado, about ninety miles past the state line. They caught a break for a change—it was a minor issue. But Dorothy wanted to stay. She liked the looks of the small highway town where truckers and tourists stopped on their way to the mountains.
“It looked like a ghost town to me,” Betty told me.
Betty got a job waiting tables at the Corner Café. Dorothy got a job at the Dairy King on the other end of town. They moved into the Silver Spur Motel while they saved enough for an apartment. The motel was dirty with bugs in the walls and tired truckers in the parking lot.
“It wasn’t like what you’d wanna take your friend to,” Betty said. “They’s scabby. But it was a place to sleep.”
That’s a feeling I understood sometimes, growing up—that something was good enough for me but would be too embarrassing to share with someone else. Sometimes I didn’t even realize there was anything to be embarrassed about.
I’d looked at our farmhouse so long that I didn’t even notice the details a visitor saw: the crumbling chimney, the chain-link fence, pans of food on the ground with a dozen cats around them, our well water gurgling yellow from the faucet for a moment before it ran clear. Over the years, many friends had been startled by where I lived—perhaps because I didn’t look, act, or speak like their stereotype of poverty.
Like a lot of the women in my family, Betty lived in run-down places but was admired for her appearance—a funny juxtaposition in that America associates poverty with ugliness, or at least uncleanliness, and a well-put-together woman will receive attention opposite that toward her rental with a sagging porch, stained carpet, and brown leak spots in the ceiling. Betty looked quite a bit like Tammy Wynette, with long blond hair in a headband and a beehive, a long, thin face with puffy eyes and frosted lipstick. Men went to the Corner Café hoping she would be their waitress.
“I don’t know, I suppose that’s where I met Dipshit,” she told me.
By “dipshit” she meant the skinny blond guy named Bob who came into the diner and asked her out. Before long, she was pregnant.
She didn’t love Bob, but marriage was what you did if you got pregnant, and practically speaking, she’d need help raising the kid. Bob had a steady job as a typesetter for the Limon Leader.
But when she neared the chapel on their wedding day, she couldn’t bring herself to stop. She kept driving and left him at the altar.
They tried again, and that second time it took. Betty wrote a letter to Dorothy, but it wasn’t about a honeymoon. It was about money and addresses. One side effect of poverty is that it’s hard to keep addresses and phone numbers straight. As an adult, I used to get frustrated with my dad when his cell-phone number changed every few months, since one would get shut off when he couldn’t pay the bill and then he’d manage to get another through a new employer or some prepaid deal at Walmart for people with bad credit. Logistics were even harder in the 1960s.
I called Anita, but couldn’t get ahold of her so will try later. Bob is working late tonight. He should be home anytime now. What did you find out at the Dr’s office? Anything? Has Joe been giving you a bad time? How is Pud doing in school? How is Polly feeling now? Better I hope. I am trying to write this & watch Badge 714. Did Grandma get the phone Bill yet? If so how much do I owe? Tell her I will pay it just as soon as I get my tax refund. The one for Kansas I had mailed to her address. Because I thought I’d be there. The Colo. One will be mailed here. So when-ever you get the bill let me know. Well I cant think of any more to write about so will close for now. Tell Grandma & Gramp I said hi & to write. Well will see you all later. Love Sis. P.S. Got a letter from Drug Store. They found the check, so will pick it up tomorrow. If there is anymore checks, you’ll have to mail some more money Because I’ve spent the 10.00. Sis.
What letters like that left out was that Bob physically and verbally abused Betty. He was what Jeannie later remembered as “a belt-snapper.” Other than Arnie, he was the only one she’d call Dad out of the seven stepfathers she’d eventually have to choose from. Bob never wanted a stepdaughter, though. Once he beat her all the way home with his belt for playing in a sandbox with the neighborhood kids. Betty was used to getting hit herself, but no one had ever hit her kid.
“After a few months of it, I thought, this ain’t gonna get it,” she told me. “What the deal was, he could accept me but he couldn’t accept the kid. And my motto is, you take one, you take both. In my eighth month of pregnancy, I’d had about enough shit from him.”
So in the spring of 1966, pregnant and broke, Betty took Jeannie back to Wichita. She got on at a factory called Southwest Grease and Oil. She stood next to a conveyer belt and filled little caps with oil, one after another, that got sent overseas to U.S. soldiers, maybe in Vietnam, who used them to oil their guns.
Soon Dorothy was back in Wichita, too, renting a house on Emporia Street, and Betty and Jeannie moved in to save money. Betty worked right up to the April day she delivered her son. A week later, she was on the factory floor again.
Bob heard about the baby’s birth and drove out from Colorado. He managed to get the boy named after him. Betty refused to go back with him, but he persisted, and she finally gave in.
“I can remember goin’ home and just fallin’ down on the couch absolutely exhausted,” Betty said. “Mom cookin’ and cleanin’ and I laid on my ass, but I think it was mainly because I just had a kid and I just was so wore out. And that’s mainly the reason I went back to that fuckin’ Bob.”
They loaded into Bob’s car with four-year-old Jeannie and baby Robert, whom they called Bo, for the long day’s drive to Colorado. Once they were on the road, Bob told Betty that the only reason he came to get her was because he wanted his son. Her heart sank to hear the cutting, cruel tone back in his voice now that he had his way.
The next spring, Dorothy sent Pud and Polly from Kansas to stay with Betty and Bob in Limon while she went back to the hospital in Larned.
“For her nerves,” Betty said.
Pud was thirteen and hated living under Bob’s roof.
“He was an asshole,” Aunt Pud said. “Never saw him crack a smile. Everything out of his mouth was hateful.” She hated his whole family, especially his mother. She didn’t like how Betty acted around them, trying to be proper. Pud went to school with one of Bob’s younger brothers and saw the way his family was admired.
“Shit, you would’ve thought they founded the town, the way they carried on,” Pud said.
Betty took a job waiting tables at the Blue Star Grill in the Blue Star motel, which sat next to the highway that would soon become Interstate 70. Sweaty truckers, frying oil, coffee, and good money off mountain-bound tourists. On a smoking break, she wrote her mom at the state mental hospital in Kansas.
Well we moved over the weekend. Sure is nice over there and 1000 times more room. Polly & Jeannie share a room. Pud has one fixed up in the basement. It was quite a job. I’ve got about 150 loads of wash. Ha Well the kids are all doing fine. I went up and talked to the school board and got Pud back in sch
ool. She starts tomorrow. We drove by Nall’s Motor Co. & Polly said “That’s where my mommie got her car fixed.” Polly tells me every day, my mommie is coming out here & get me when she gets out of the hospital. But she is real well ajusted now. Pud is working out here from 5 to 9. She’s doing dishes, but business hasn’t been to good so she isn’t working too hard.
Jeannie dictated a few lines to her great-grandparents Ed and Irene in Wichita. “I like Kansas better than Colorado,” she said, and Betty wrote it.
When Dorothy got out of the state hospital, Pud and Polly switched households yet again, leaving Colorado to move back in with her in Kansas. Then, within a few months, Dorothy had another whim and they moved back to Limon.
“It was like living in the circus,” Pud told me. “Without the fun.”
For the women in my family and their daughters, the constant moving was about staying safe from violent men and finding new ways to pay the bills. Leaving sad places behind, they seized on the promise of new ones. But they knew well enough that tomorrow’s promise would end up yesterday’s sadness. Unlike women in so many sad stories, they always found a way to leave. But in matters of house and home, they often had nowhere to go, and the same cycles would begin again.
Moving in with her serious, much older boyfriend just over a year after her divorce from my dad presented some challenges for Mom, who was used to running the show around the house. Unlike other men we knew, newspaper columnist Bob had ideas about how things should look. Mom liked things to be elegant and feminine with rich colors. Bob liked things to have hard edges and wild designs in black and white. His house was full of evidence that their life histories didn’t match.
He had a collection of subprofessional tennis trophies and a shelf full of art books, biographies of writers, collections of Beat poetry. I’d stare up at the spines, a list of names my sporadic, largely rural education had not introduced to me, and pull them down one by one. He filled the refrigerator with foods labeled “low fat,” preposterous in our family of laborers who needed hearty food to get through the day. He kept a weight bench in the basement, unnecessary for the men I knew who lifted things for a living. He had a subscription to something called the New Yorker, which Mom liked to tell him he kept on the coffee table just for show. He earned a newspaperman’s modest salary, but that stretched pretty far in Wichita.