Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  Bob was well into his forties, eighteen years older than Mom. He had a grown son and teenage twin daughters whose closets contained sweatshirts that read BANANA REPUBLIC. They had cool, round wire eyeglasses and curly brown hair. Their mom was Jewish, they told me. I had never before met a Jewish person, that I knew of. My new stepsisters loved to read, write, and draw. They were like me and Mom, I felt, where in our own family we were strange for our creative and intellectual passions. Mom acted fun and patient around the twins, which drove me mad with jealousy.

  Bob wanted to spend every weekend staying in and watching rented VHS tapes of Woody Allen movies and French documentaries. He liked things to be just so. Loud noises made him grit his teeth. He listened to public radio, which I’d never heard aside from commodities reports on AM radio. The dull crackle of it made me want to drive knives into my ears in the backseat of his sports car. Mom, who preferred to drive but didn’t get to in Bob’s car, sat in the passenger seat and made witty comments that delighted Bob. He’d never met a woman like her, he said. She was charming even when she was acting foolish, he said. Mom would roll her eyes and tell him to go read the New Yorker.

  Bob didn’t criticize where we were from directly, but he made his distaste for our side of town one of the running jokes of his column that ran three times a week in the Wichita Eagle. He liked to razz the west side as backward country bumpkins and trumpet the east side, where he lived, as the only civilized part of town. The town’s first Gap had recently opened there. There were nice restaurants, ivied old brick neighborhoods. The west side was highway diners, discount shops, and bingo halls.

  Bob did offer plenty of direct criticism on other points, including our behavior. Mom scrunched her eyebrows too often, which would cause wrinkles, he said. Matt and I laughed too loud, he said, at things that weren’t even funny. He fretted over stuff I’d never seen a man fret over, like where to hang a picture on a wall. He also praised my artwork, bought cool toys for Matt, and took us to a tennis court, where he patiently taught us both how to serve. For my birthday, he gave me a Paula Abdul cassette tape I’d longed for. Sometimes he was interested in hearing what I had to say. It was hard not to like the guy.

  Still, I was distraught living in their house on the east side of town. Matt and I couldn’t escape the tension in Bob’s house the way Mom could. At her real estate agency, she had made a new best friend—a smart, funny, pretty woman about her age who had survived a hard upbringing and volunteered at the hospital holding rape victims’ hands. So far as Mom was concerned, she was one of the few people she ever worked with who knew anything about real life. They started partying together, hard, a rebellion against her second husband. When she was still with Dad, she began to get a taste of the nightlife she’d never had, having married and had babies so young in a remote country place. Now, Bob resented her wild nights on the town. The more he frowned at her partying, the shorter her skirts got.

  I knew she was failing me in the process, and I told anyone who would listen. While we were still in the apartment, before we moved in with Bob, two agents from Social Rehabilitative Services knocked on our apartment door to ask Mom questions and look around. They said they were there because the school psychologist asked me about my home life, and I told her my mom was mean to me. Mom had sent them packing and lit into me with rage. Now, as I finished fifth grade, things hadn’t improved much.

  At the start of that summer of 1991, Grandma Betty and I sat in her little Toyota, parked in the driveway of the tiny house she’d fixed up on Second Street. I’d been telling her how much I hated where I lived. She listened seriously, like someone who had been miserable as a child and promised herself that when she grew up she’d always believe children who said they were miserable.

  “Would you want to stay with me?” she asked.

  She meant for good, or as far as “for good” ever counted. The moment recalled when Mom and I visited a ritzy private school, where teachers and staff showed me around. Mom asked whether I wanted to enroll there. The answer inside me was yes, but I said no, and she was relieved; I now know that the cost of tuition was probably more than half of her annual salary. This time, though, again faced with a question whose importance I understood amid the anguish of guilt, I said exactly what I felt: yes.

  I don’t know why Mom agreed. Maybe it was about money. Maybe it was stress, or a boyfriend who often seemed put upon that she came with two children. Maybe, being so young herself, she deferred to her own mother’s suggestion. Dad wasn’t consulted and, I imagine, didn’t expect to be. In our family, women made the decisions and no one pretended otherwise. In this case, the decision felt to me like it was mine, though I was just shy of eleven years old.

  Being broke has a way of separating families: Unaffordable children put on trains and sent west as farm labor. Divorced dads without gas money stuck across town from their kids. Children driven north to live with an aunt after a hurricane floods a low-lying ward the city didn’t tend to.

  I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew my interpretation of a feeling: My own mother didn’t want me.

  And I was right, to an extent, in those years. Parents with less money than my mom have made sacrifices to hold on to their children that she wasn’t willing to make. What separated her and me was far more than money troubles. It was a wall that a hard life had built in her. But then that hard life had a lot to do with money. She too had been split from her mother as a result of poverty.

  The separation that came between you and me was of a quite different sort, but it had to do with our economic class, and in that way I couldn’t escape repeating a family cycle even as I broke it.

  The incessant relocating that Betty began in the early 1960s wouldn’t slow down for a long time, and the worst of it coincided with Jeannie’s grade-school years. She went to four different kindergartens. Her first one was in Limon in the fall of 1967.

  Dorothy and Betty had pooled their money from the Blue Star Grill to open their own place, the Frontier, at a major all-night truck stop on the northern edge of town.

  All the family letters back and forth across the plains from those years are about money and where people are going to live. In one, written during a 4 a.m. work break at the Frontier, Dorothy wrote to her parents in Kansas after the first snow of the season. It was five degrees outside and cold inside the restaurant kitchen, where she sat down before the breakfast rush.

  Guess Betty called you today. Bob told me she did. I ain’t talked to her yet since she called. I just ain’t got around to call yet. I got up & got Pud & Polly & drove around to find a house to rent. I found 3 but I will probably rent the one I looked at first. It’s nice & clean, newly decorated & bigger. Only 10.00 month more than the others. Well there ain’t much news around here. We are doing O.K. with our place. Guess we’ll keep it another month & see how it goes. Last week our gross sales were 1494.94. They will be about 200.00 less this week counting tomorrow. We only had a little over 300.00 worth of stock when we opened & a lot of our profit first month went back into stock so our profits should show up better this month as we’ve got about 3 times as much stock as we started with when we opened. I’d like to save enough to come back there & buy another house before too long. But won’t know how we’ll do for a while yet.

  Their truck-stop diner would turn out to be a big success. “A helluva good business,” Grandma Betty told me years later. Home life, however, was getting worse.

  When Bob hit Betty, it was officially a crime, but there wasn’t any use in calling the cops. Domestic violence wasn’t taken seriously, and Bob knew everybody in their small Colorado burg on the plains, from the police station to the grocery store. Betty, meanwhile, was a twenty-three-year-old outsider from Wichita, a social challenge likely not helped by her unapologetic wearing of miniskirts and go-go boots.

  Betty had left Bob twice before. First, when her gut told her to keep driving past a Colorado wedding
chapel. Then, when she drove to Wichita late during her pregnancy with their son. But she finally decided to leave him for good—especially for Jeannie, whom Bob still treated hatefully.

  “If it had been just me, I probably could’ve handled it for a while,” Betty told me. “I couldn’t even tell you what he would say to her, but I can remember—everything she done was wrong.”

  Betty left, taking both of the kids with her. She got her own place in Limon and filed for divorce. She was awarded custody of Bo, and Bob got visitation rights.

  Before too long, Betty hooked up with a new guy named Johnny, this one tall and broad-shouldered with a crew cut.

  “He was kind of back-asswards,” Betty remembered.

  But he was good to the kids and could help pay the bills, help her get away from Bob and Limon and its gossip. Soon Betty, Johnny, Jeannie, and Bo moved west toward the Rockies. Jeannie started her second kindergarten, in Denver.

  Betty’s divorce from Bob was final on Valentine’s Day. She married Johnny right away. They moved into a house on a hill above a sidewalk in Alameda, a small town outside Denver, which everyone said was haunted. Jeannie had bad dreams there. Noises came out of the basement. Johnny stood at the top of the stairs with a flashlight, peering down the steps, Jeannie remembered.

  Back in Limon, Dorothy’s mental health was getting bad again. Teenage Pud couldn’t stand her mother being off her rocker, so she moved back in with Betty. That was good for Betty since Pud could babysit Jeannie while she and Johnny worked, and Betty never turned down an unhappy family member who wanted to move in, regardless.

  Within months, they moved again, up into the mountains. Maybe it was for a job. No one remembers. Jeannie started her third kindergarten, in Colorado Springs.

  Next, maybe a couple months later, they moved right back out of the Rockies into a trailer park in Aurora. Jeannie started her fourth kindergarten there in the spring of 1968.

  Betty took a factory job. She updated her Wichita grandparents, Ed and Irene, with a letter I later found that was, like all the rest, about money. Funny enough, here I am writing you a letter, of sorts, about the same thing.

  When I was a kid, it was Betty who told me that if I had trouble saying something to someone, sit down and put it in a letter. Back then the letters were for another reason—she couldn’t afford a phone call. I had some moments like that, too. But Betty was the only person other than me in our family who wanted to plainly say what the hell was going on in the most practical terms.

  Here is a check for the two phone calls I called collect, when I talked to mom, it should pay for it. If it isn’t enough let me know & I will send more. I am working now doing factory work, parts for missles (dont know how to spell it).

  Johnny had decided he didn’t like her working, though, so a week later she was off that job and writing another update to her family.

  Jeannie had her party yesterday & had all her friends over, they all had a big time, was glad to get it over, Bo is growing up too, he gets into everything he can reach. He is really a pill. Johnny is at work. He works everyday of the week. We are trying to get all our bills paid off. But I dont like to see him work everyday. But I guess when we get a couple bills paid off, then we can afford for him to take a day or two off each week. As for me, I was working at a factory, But I quit, Johnny wanted me to, he said, I should stay home with the kids. But I feel bad about not helping out with the bills. Well I guess everyone is in debt through, so guess I shouldnt feel bad about it. Johnny needs to go to the hospital & have his teeth fixed. They are all real bad, I guess he will go sometime in Dec. & have them all pulled & get dentures. I dont know when I will have my done, I need to do it though. Well I should get busy. It’s 10:15 now, Johnny will be home about 4. So better get started on this house & cook dinner, so better close till later.

  A week later, Betty was working again, this time because they needed money to move their trailer back to Limon. She waited tables at the Isle-o-Pines Lodge and Motel by the Stream, wedged against a mountainside on Highway 6.

  Mom is still working at the same place, Pud quit school & is going to go to work I guess. Polly is okay. Jeannie get’s out of school the 6 th of June. Her teacher said she is very smart, she has a real high I.Q. She (the teacher) said she was in the top ten of her class. So that made me pretty happy. Bo is growing real tall & still as blond as ever, He is partly potty trained now. As for me & Johnny, were both okay. We are moving back to Limon for sure. I guess it will be okay once we get there, It’s just getting there that’s going to hurt, It will cost 125.50 to move the trailer. But I guess were going to buy a lot or acre from his folks, so after we pay for it, we wont have any parking trailer Rent. So guess we’ll be better off money wise anyway.

  P.S. If you see Aaron, tell him to send Mom some Child Support money for Pud. If I was Mom, I’d have his ass in jail for about 15 yrs back child support!

  They wouldn’t ever buy an acre from Johnny’s parents to park their trailer. Johnny was good to her kids, and he was a hard worker. But one day he punched Betty in the face and broke her jaw.

  Her mouth was wired shut when he came to beg her to take him back. She said no. My mom remembered talking to him as he left for the last time.

  “I went downstairs and he was sitting in the car and had all his shit in there,” Mom said. “He was crying.”

  Meanwhile, Bob had court-ordered visits with Bo every six weeks. He was still in Limon, involved in a new relationship of his own.

  “I think he was running around with her, actually, before we ever split up,” Betty said. “At the time, I thought it was her friend that he was jackin’ around with. But it turned out it was her. At least, it turned out he married her.”

  With a new wife, Bob had a complete household to show the courts. Betty was served with papers charging that she was an unfit mother. Bob was suing for custody of Bo. He said that, if she didn’t cooperate, he’d not only take Bo, he’d have Jeannie taken away from her, too.

  A court-appointed attorney told Betty it wouldn’t help her defense that she was gearing up for her third divorce and umpteenth place of residence. She needed to prove to the judge that she could provide a stable home.

  So many interactions with society require a permanent address: Car licensing and registration. Insurance applications. A public library card. Voting. The transience of the poor suggests instability, but what it really represents is poverty itself.

  Betty’s long list of residences wasn’t for poor decision making but something like the opposite. She was somehow finding a way to get out every time a situation became too dangerous for her and her children, yet she was all but condemned by circumstance to another dangerous situation.

  In court, Bob’s attorneys used both her gender and her poverty against her. They shamed her for being single with three ex-husbands in her early twenties and said her numerous past addresses suggested an unstable environment. So the judge awarded custody to a violent man with small-town community standing rather than to a divorced waitress with pro bono counsel.

  Betty worried that Jeannie would be taken away, as Bob had threatened. She called her brother, Carl, who had left Texas and was living with his young family in Detroit. He had met his hardworking, no-nonsense wife, Pat, when they were teenagers in Wichita in the 1950s. Pat’s childhood home had been even worse off, moneywise. Now they had three kids and a nice little house on a decent street in the Motor City. He was an Army veteran and a clean-cut professional accountant. If Jeannie went there, Betty thought, she’d have a stable home that the courts couldn’t argue with.

  “I knew that if I signed her over to Carl, I couldn’t lose her,” Betty told me.

  Dorothy raised hell at this idea. She said she would take Jeannie herself before she let her be sent off to Michigan. But Betty wouldn’t have it, knowing how her mom was prone to going off her rocker.

  Adoption papers were dr
awn up in Detroit. Carl didn’t finalize the process but had the paperwork in case he needed it. In August 1968, Betty put her six-year-old daughter on a plane. Maybe Carl paid for the ticket. Jeannie took a yellow plastic coin bank shaped like a cat on the flight. She told the nice stewardess its name was Banana. The stewardess took her to the cockpit, where she showed Banana to the pilot. She was buckled into a seat near the front of the plane. It was her first time flying.

  In the fall of 1968, Jeannie started first grade in Detroit—her fifth school in five towns in one year.

  Like my mother, I came to know firsthand the relationship between place of residence and place of schooling. Attending eight schools by ninth grade taught me that, if you can hold to your center without going crazy, you’re the same person wherever you go, even as the scenery changes. That scenery is shaped, in part, by money and class.

  If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school’s desk you’ll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food. Teachers, for such children, become mothers; schools become houses; and cafeterias become hearths. It can be brutal, then, to exit a school for what an adult has informed you will be the last time, when that school has been the steadiest place you’ve ever known.

  I remember being at a middle-school teachers’ meeting once when I was an adult reporting a news story about public education, and one of the teachers let the others know that a student had been kicked out of her house and was ostensibly homeless.