Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  In theory, women were being liberated during those years, but the poorest of them had the least agency for independence in real life. In some cases, dependence on men was deadly. Domestic violence occurs at all socioeconomic levels, of course, but the woman who can’t afford to leave will have more chances to be killed.

  Not long after his relationship with Betty, Ray moved in with a woman who soon died. Rumor was that she fell out of Ray’s semi while he was driving.

  “Fell out,” my mom would say with a skeptical look the handful of times I heard the family story. “Right.”

  Meanwhile, Betty, who had been abused by three out of three husbands—Ray in Wichita, and Bob and Johnny in Colorado—was repeatedly told she had to have a spouse to win back custody of Bo. She needed to show a “stable household,” male lawyers told her, as if any man she’d ever been with had been a force of stability, economic or otherwise. It was true that she had little chance of establishing one herself then as a single, poor female so often transient by necessity. Based on that legal advice—never having truly given up on getting her son back—she went on what she would later call her “marrying kick.”

  In early 1971, when she was twenty-five, she made a deal with a Mexican immigrant named Miguel who barely spoke English. He had light, pinkish skin, blue eyes, and black hair. He said he was of Spanish descent and had a sister with blond hair. He went by Mike. They married so that he could get his green card and Betty could show the courts a husband in her fight to get her son. Before they parted ways, Mike got his visa, but Betty didn’t get her son.

  Betty moved to Belle Plaine, a small town south of Wichita, to work in a diner in a highway motel. She and Jeannie lived in a room there, while Dorothy and Polly lived in the main employee quarters. Pud had gotten pregnant by a biker when she was fifteen and they were all still in Colorado. She lived on her own now with her little girl, Candy. Dorothy managed the restaurant and helped run the whole motel. They ate all their meals for free in the motel restaurant, which wasn’t a bad deal.

  Waiting tables in that little farming town, Betty met a Vietnam vet named Galen who worked at the Case tractor dealer the next town over. She was twenty-six when he became her fifth husband.

  On the Fourth of July, Galen freaked out when the fireworks went off. He hadn’t been back from Vietnam for long and was too messed up to live with. Betty divorced him the next year.

  She and Jeannie got their own apartment back in Wichita. Then she fell in love, for real, with the only man she ever loved but didn’t marry. Herb worked at a salvage lot near her place and asked her out when she was there for a car part. He was small, rugged, and Jewish, which in that area was a rare thing to be. He was going through a divorce, he said, which was another way of saying he was still married.

  “He thought he was good-lookin’,” Betty said. “And he really wasn’t.”

  Herb had a camper, a motorcycle, and several cars he’d fixed up. He took Betty and Jeannie camping at Cheney Lake. He bought Betty a necklace, a jade stone on a silver chain, such a rare gift that she never forgot its details. He came over to their apartment, and when Betty cooked him dinner, he always said thank you.

  Herb encouraged her to get a government education grant, probably federal funds for women by way of recently passed Title IX legislation. Not having been in a classroom for well over a decade, since she left school during tenth grade, Betty attended a small business college in Wichita, where she learned to type, write business letters, and do general office work.

  She worked for the next couple years as a teacher’s aide at a private school and then as a secretary for a chiropractor. In 1975, Betty and Jeannie moved into a trailer park on the southwest side of Wichita. As had happened so many times before, Dorothy and Polly moved to be close to Betty and Jeannie. They took a mobile home in the same court.

  Betty had been with Herb for a couple years, far longer than some of her marriages combined. She told me Herb might have become her sixth husband had she not said to herself, That’s all I’ve ever done, my whole life, is be married to somebody. I don’t need to get married. Seems like every time I do, it ends in disaster. It was a good decision. Herb ended up getting another woman pregnant and marrying her, Betty told me.

  I look back on that story with something close to fondness. That time, Betty had her heart broken for perfectly pedestrian reasons that have nothing to do with class. Infidelity—a common and perfectly survivable trouble. I sometimes feel that way about my own life now, when something feels like the end of the world. I calm down realizing that it’s the sort of problem everybody has, whereas the problems I was born into really could kill a person. Your problems as a working-class girl would have included true peril.

  By then, Jeannie was a teenager getting busted by her mom for smoking and drinking. Since she and Betty were going rounds, she decided to go live with her dad in Oklahoma City. There, quiet men followed her around like they had been assigned to protect her. She waited in the car while Ray had meetings in bars. She saw the men come out into the parking lot. They laughed at everything her dad said while he smirked.

  Jeannie made long-distance calls from Ray’s house, where his rig was parked out front, and he complained that she was costing him money. He took her to the mall and stole a diamond ring to impress her, but what she felt was shame. She only lasted a few months there before she returned to her mom in Kansas. She never saw her dad again.

  By then, Betty had managed to steer clear of violent men like Ray and most of her other husbands and end up with guys who had more tolerable problems, like philandering Herb.

  One was Dean, a short, religious guy who owned a construction company. He had a clean new home on the northeast side of town where the “rich people” lived, in Betty’s eyes. He was lower middle class but stunned Betty by taking her shopping at Sears and telling her to pick out three or four outfits, which she had a hard time doing without feeling wasteful, because who bought more than one outfit at once?

  The other man Betty met soon after her breakup with Herb was Arnie. He asked her to two-step at a dance hall on the highway. He didn’t appear to have much to offer—a divorced farmer in a gray felt cowboy hat with grown children and little money, thirteen years older than Betty was. She thought he was fun, though. When he called and asked her to go to the Ice Capades, Betty said yes. But then she decided she didn’t want to date a farmer who lived way out in the country. At the last minute, she changed her mind and came up with an excuse to cancel.

  Dean asked her to marry him. She said yes, but it wasn’t for love.

  “He had money up the ass,” she explained. She’d get even with Herb for marrying another woman, and she and Jeannie could live comfortably with Dean’s income.

  They moved into Dean’s house. Life with enough money for a shopping spree at Sears turned out to be a hard trade, however. Dean had a high, squeaky voice. He whined and complained about every damn thing, Betty and Jeannie agreed.

  That sixth marriage lasted a matter of months, as most of her marriages had. It was pretty clear by then that bad reasons could make Betty marry someone but couldn’t make her stay.

  In 1977, Betty landed a position that would change the trajectory of her life, financially and therefore personally—working for the state as a secretary at the county courthouse in downtown Wichita.

  She earned $800 a month to work in a comfortable office, which struck her as a joke after years of making far less for grueling labor in restaurants and factories. She and Jeannie had moved out of Dean’s home and back to the trailer park across town, where Dorothy still lived with Polly, now a curly-haired teenager. After a long string of wild moves, marriages, and divorces, the group of single moms and their daughters was together again. They had traveled thousands of miles and changed dozens of addresses together, all to return to the same place.

  But things were different now. When Betty went to work, she put on
high heels and clicked across the lobby of the courthouse that employed important, powerful people.

  For all the blessings of the job, she found secretarial work boring, typing and filing documents while male coworkers came and went. So when she heard the county subpoena officer for the juvenile court was leaving, she asked for the job.

  “That’s no job for a woman,” Betty remembered the judge she worked under telling her. A few years prior, though, the Civil Rights Act had been expanded to prohibit employer discrimination against women in state agencies.

  “Check the law on that,” Betty told him. She got the job.

  As a subpoena officer for the juvenile courts in Sedgwick County, Betty drove through Wichita’s rough neighborhoods to walk up crumbling sidewalks and deliver bad news. She told parents they had to show up in court for their children’s crimes, or that they were on the verge of losing custody of their kids. Sometimes they got irate. A drunk man with a gun said he would blow her away. A woman pulled a knife on her in a stairwell. Betty calmly talked her way out of those situations—a lifetime of survival skills put to good use.

  Emboldened by her success as a subpoena officer, Betty signed up for the Wichita Police Reserve. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 had opened doors for female officers, previously barred in many places from, say, arresting adult offenders or riding patrol after dark. It was the late 1970s, and they didn’t even have to wear high heels anymore. There was just one other woman in the mix when Betty joined the reserves, but she didn’t give it much thought. She enlisted to do a job, not to make a point.

  Around the same time that I started thinking about you—asking myself what I would do, what I would want, for my own daughter—I found notes Betty had taken during training classes. The spiral notebook was evidence of a courageous moment when Grandma sat in a room full of men. She had written down the chain of command, types of traffic accidents, how to identify pot, when to discharge a gun, the meaning of a “29.” What type of evidence goes to the lab? When can you enter a house without knocking? What is the difference between “aggravated battery” and plain “battery”? What do you do when the person you’ve arrested is intoxicated?

  After long days serving subpoenas, Betty put on a blue uniform, got in a patrol car with a male partner who was a full police officer, and went out into the night. Mostly they put drunks in the tank, which she found satisfying. One night, though, she opened her car door outside a robbery in progress and heard the zip of a bullet. She and her partner ducked behind their car doors before they gave chase through a nearby graveyard. Betty’s heart pounded as she ran with her heavy holster. The man escaped.

  “Was it at all a relief that he got away?” I asked her, since she’d admitted she was scared.

  “No,” she told me. “I wanted to catch the bastard.”

  In just a couple years she’d gone from being a woman who married men out of economic necessity to a woman who was financially stable on her own. Along the way, she’d been mailing birthday and Valentine’s Day cards to her son, which Bob probably didn’t give him. Now she could finally do what she’d been working toward. She renewed her custody fight with gusto.

  It had been a decade since she lost custody during those worst of years in small-town Colorado in the 1960s. Bob said she was wasting everyone’s time.

  “I told him forget it,” she remembered. “I would never give up.”

  She was served papers stating that the court had again sided with Bob, maintaining his full custody of Bo. She sent a letter refusing to relinquish rights to see and raise her son. The next month, she got a letter from her attorney saying he couldn’t represent her and was withdrawing from the case.

  “The bastard took him, and I never got him back,” Betty said. “And it wasn’t because I didn’t fight for him.”

  It was because she was a woman in poverty, beholden to so many men over the years—to provide money for baby formula, to hire her for a job that would allow her to feed her family, to decide whether she got to keep her children. Economic power is social power. In the end, for all her hard work and tenacity, the poor woman lacks both.

  Around the time I moved in with Grandma Betty in Wichita, Aunt Pud and Uncle Larry moved into an old house across the alley from our place. I was excited to live so close to my cousin Shelly, by then an eighth grader who was old enough to be a high school sophomore. She’d been held back in elementary school for struggling to keep up amid so many changes of school, curriculum, teachers—a common plight for kids with impermanent addresses.

  Aunt Pud had made a living cooking for restaurants since she was a teenage apprentice to Dorothy. Uncle Larry worked at the Boeing airplane factory that seemed to employ half the men and women of our neighborhood of small postwar houses and spotty grass lawns. Pud took a job in the kitchen of a Catholic school not far from us in the Mexican American enclave. It was close to North High, where Grandma had dropped out of tenth grade in 1960.

  Since Aunt Pud prepped school lunches at the private Catholic school, Shelly got to go there for free. Pud somehow finagled a discounted fee for me too and offered to drive me to and from school when she went to work. It was in an impoverished neighborhood—private for being run by a church, not for its prestige.

  Mom sewed my uniform skirt, as she had sewn many of my clothes growing up, from a navy, white, and yellow plaid fabric. She took me to the mall and bought me the two pairs of shoes I most coveted: black Adidas sneakers and brown leather Eastland loafers. Grandma took me to the Dollar General store for the rest: navy slacks, white imitation Polo shirts, navy cardigans.

  I rode to school with Shelly in her mom’s long, maroon 1970s car with cigarette burns in the seats. We left before dawn so that Aunt Pud could start prep work in the kitchen for school lunch. While Shelly hung out with eighth graders dropped off early for their own reasons, I spent the hours before the first bell roaming the halls. I slunk in and out of storage rooms, stealing whatever I pleased. An American flag folded into a thick, precious triangle was my favorite score.

  Most of the kids at my new school had brown skin and black hair and spoke in half Spanish. My first and only friend, Dawn, was from an interracial family; she had light green eyes and a huge mass of long hair that was at once blond and frizzy. We didn’t have much in common. She’d already hit puberty, and eighth-grade boys liked to look at her large chest. I could have easily passed for a boy with my hair tucked in my baseball cap. Dawn liked New Kids on the Block and Beverly Hills, 90210, and I liked rap music and cop shows. But she doubled over laughing on her bed when I prank-called boys from her bedroom telephone.

  A lot of people talk about how much they hated middle school. I remember it as the happiest years of my life—a brief window in which I was old enough to leave the house on truly independent adventures but was not yet viewed by the world as a woman. My family didn’t put anything on me about being a girl, either. Maybe in some families I would have been “protected” and discouraged from roving the streets, especially poor ones like ours, more so than a boy would have been. But what I felt in those years, when I could walk down a sidewalk without male attention and nobody cared where I was or what I did, was true freedom.

  We worked on the farm every weekend, and that’s where I felt most at home. I was happy when, less than three years after I’d left that countryside, Grandma said we were moving out to the farm for good.

  She had decided to rent out the little Wichita house. She’d have a long drive to work again, but Grandpa wouldn’t have to drive his truck to Wichita after a long day of chores and fieldwork.

  For the remainder of sixth grade, a small school bus picked me up and took me south to the tiny post of Murdock, population 275, where the dirt was red and almost everyone was poor. There was a white, two-room schoolhouse that had been there since the horse-and-wagon days. The entire school, kindergarten through eighth grade, contained thirty-two students. I made t
hirty-three.

  My grade consisted of three other girls and me. Each day we were handed an ancient textbook and instructed to work out various assignments, which I completed for all four of us. Then the teacher let us go outside to climb in the dusty playground or roam down the dirt road to Main Street’s remaining wisp of a general store with a wooden walkway under its awning. Since there were so few students, lunch was a homemade meal cooked by a handful of old women with German last names.

  Like everyone else at Murdock, I joined the track team and rode buses across the area to compete against other farm kids, our white tennis shoes stained the color of rust from the red clay dirt of our dying hamlet that other towns called “Mud Rock.” Though I was short, I was good at jumping and ran hurdles against Amish girls who wore bike shorts underneath their home-sewn skirts.

  The Amish girls almost always won every event, which the rest of us small-town teams attributed to their farm work being even harder—and thus their bodies being tougher—than ours. They didn’t have the help of modern machinery, and if you took the two-lane blacktop north from our farm you’d see the women in bonnets working behind a plow.

  The Amish boys never took home as many track meet medals, as I recall. I can’t say why. I do know what you would have learned, being the daughter of laborers: Doing “men’s work” as a female can develop an inner defiance that, channeled to your legs, will win a race. Even if you’re running in a skirt.

  Betty’s parents were turning elderly just as I moved in with her, so Betty soon was taking care of them and me at the same time. Great-Grandpa Aaron had returned to Kansas from Colorado decades prior. He and Great-Grandma Dorothy lived in different parts of Wichita, but both had cupboards holding little more than tubs of government-issued peanut butter and fake cheese from a county food pantry. They didn’t have any crackers or bread to put it on, so Grandma and I would make grocery runs for them at a run-down store in the area. To make sure the peanut butter and cheese didn’t go to waste, we’d take a full tub for our own cabinet.