by Sarah Smarsh
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She leaned toward me and slumped her pale, soft arms onto my shoulders. I put my arms around her. Her slight weight hung on me like a flower on a fence. I held her while she cried. Her brown hair was curled and full of smoke, and her face was wet and soft. I couldn’t remember her saying sorry to me ever, once, in my entire life.
“It’s okay,” I said. You couldn’t be her child and not feel the difference between how much love she had inside her and how little she was able to let out or in.
I think that gulf was because of the violence she endured—the childhood in poverty, the abuse and neglect, the frustration of being a brilliant woman with little opportunity, the early pregnancies. For some reason, I could always feel the love inside me and other people—even ones like you, who didn’t exist.
The women I knew were always talking about how their nerves were shot or they were at their wit’s end or the end of their rope. The men who apparently played a role in putting them there were faces marked out or torn away in buried photo albums I exhumed from the farmhouse’s wooden drawers—unnamed feminism revealed, maybe, by women refusing to throw away perfectly good photos of themselves in which unkind men could simply be erased.
Back when Betty was dating Herb, the guy who ran the salvage yard, he, Betty, and Pud used to meet for beers at a bar called the Calendar Girl across the street from his auto shop. Pud liked Herb because he had a sense of humor and a beautiful Thunderbird. It was good to get out and blow off some steam with a few beers at the Calendar Girl. She always remembered the old woman who ran the joint. She was seventy years old and would dance under black lights on the dark floor.
“She had a good body but an old face,” Pud told me. I knew that woman, I thought. There was a particular look about females of my class who survived that long and ran their own business—a dive bar, a tax-preparation service out of their trailer, a junkyard inherited from a father. They wore thrift-store jeans originally sold in the juniors section at shopping malls and held cigarettes like they were permanent extensions of their wrinkled hands. They were usually blissfully single by choice and had too many pets. They felt to me like warriors back from battle, full of love but capable of being provoked back into fighting mode. That was Grandma Betty in her later years. It’s a part of your lineage that I’m proud of.
Once we were walking out of Walmart, the summer heat on the asphalt parking lot making me nauseous and my sweaty hand sticking to a plastic bag. I looked over at Betty to see how she was holding up. We approached her car, which was parked legally in a spot with a handicapped sign. She’d recently had a botched surgery on a foot deformed by decades of wearing high heels that had ended up making the pain worse.
As we put the Walmart bags into the trunk, a woman with permed hair walked behind us toward the store. We were climbing into the car when she spoke.
“You don’t look very handicapped to me,” she said to Grandma.
Betty’s cheeks suddenly seemed to sag. She drew a long breath through her nose. Something changed somewhere behind her green eyes, and there she was—the Betty of the past that was rarely discussed but always felt.
Betty grabbed the roof of the car with her left hand and jerked herself out to point at her bad foot.
“Look here, you dumb broad, I had surgery on this foot.”
The woman stopped, and her mouth fell open.
“I’ve got a tag right here,” Betty yelled, yanking the blue permit from the rearview mirror and waving it around.
Tears were coming.
“I know one damn thing, I can still kick your fat ass with this foot!”
Her voice shook. Tears ran down her face, but she didn’t sob.
The woman turned and hurried off with an indignant frown. Betty climbed back into the hot car. She wiped at her face, shaking and smearing gray eyeliner across her cheeks.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
We drove down Highway 54 from Wichita to the farm in silence. By the time we passed the Cheney exit I knew she was thinking about something else, maybe what she would make for dinner.
“Here, Lou,” she said. “Look at this receipt and make sure she rung up all the coupons.”
Grandma qualified for disability benefits and took an early retirement not long after that. She’d worked nearly nonstop since her first job at a soda fountain in the 1950s. She’d spent almost twenty years counseling men in the criminal justice system, doing twice the work of her male colleagues, she said, for less pay. Her mom had been dead less than a year, and now her career had passed away, too.
Once she quit her job, it was the first time an adult had ever been home when I got back from school. I’d walk from the bus, past the garden and the dogs on the porch, through the screen door, and up the sagging wooden stairs beneath ceiling tiles collapsing with water damage. I’d hear People’s Court on the heavy, square television that sat on top of the dresser in Betty’s bedroom. She’d be asleep there; she and Arnie slept in separate rooms, partly because of his snoring. There would be a Redbook magazine lying next to her, open to the recipes in the back. On her nightstand, a pack of menthol cigarettes and an ashtray that made the air in the room burn my nose.
Half wrapped in a cheap, faded comforter of white and blue, Betty would be sprawled across her full-size mattress, twisted and bent into an anguished position. Sometimes I walked in to pet the tiny dog that slept next to her, guarding her, and I’d see that even in sleep Betty’s light eyebrows were furrowed and there was a frown on her mouth, which had finally begun to wrinkle as a smoker’s lips will do. She smelled of ash and mint—the cigarettes, her candy Red Hots that she kept in a Mason jar, the chalky pink candies from the dollar store that tasted like Pepto-Bismol, the strong odor of Icy Hot menthol ointment spread across her shoulders to distract her from the pain she felt there.
Betty had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which some doctors said was all in her head and others said was real. Chronic fatigue, or whatever it was, came with another problem, called fibromyalgia, also dubious if one believed medical texts. That caused the tissue in Betty’s shoulders to swell painfully.
It made sense to me that she would develop something called “chronic fatigue.” I had a sense of how much living she had done. I remembered, too, how infinite her energy once had seemed. There had been a time when, if she couldn’t sleep at 4 a.m., she’d say to hell with it and go downstairs to organize the kitchen cabinets. All that restlessness, all that living, to my mind were tied up with the exhaustion that now left her sleeping in the afternoon sun.
The room was completely silent, country silent, and the sun came through the windows, making the flimsy white curtains transparent and revealing a cat sleeping in the windowsill. The bedroom walls were reddish-brown sheets of wood chips held together with glue. On one wall hung a cheap crucifix from when she had converted to the Church nearly twenty years prior. A “palm,” as we called the dry, yellowed palm leaves used in Palm Sunday ritual, was wedged into the doorframe, just like in my bedroom and in Arnie’s. Her dark wood bureau, a real bargain at a farm sale years ago, was covered with family photos, most of which were of me and Matt over the years, in cheap frames made of aluminum and sold for $1.99.
On the hardwood floor lay small rugs covered in cat hair and dog-poop stains. Betty was a voracious housekeeper, but it was a big old house, hard to maintain amid pain and depression. Upstairs, the four bedrooms collected dust, and the litter box overflowed in a small bathroom. Downstairs, the carpet needed vacuuming in the little space behind the steps, where Arnie calculated on tiny memo notepads his “figures” of wheat prices, cattle prices, cost of equipment repairs, hay sold to passersby. The kitchen needed sweeping, and so did the adjoining laundry room and the “extra room” off the porch with a deep freeze packed full of meat we’d wrapped. The downstairs bathroom needed to be scoured, and the dining room with all its cab
inets needed dusting. So did the living room. Then there was the damp basement, which wound in the shape of a U. It was full of canned vegetables and Kerr jars of sand-plum jelly covered in gray dust and cobwebs.
Arnie would come in after finishing chores. Betty would drag herself downstairs to peel potatoes, then bread and fry the pack of homemade pork chops bleeding through white butcher paper after thawing all day in the kitchen sink. As she made dinner, not speaking, she was preoccupied.
She and Grandpa had started bickering, as they rarely had before. Their twentieth wedding anniversary was approaching, and Camp Fun Farm, as Aunt Pud used to call it, was less fun than it once was. Arnie was in his midsixties and still tending the farm, because cattle need fed whether a farmer has bad knees or not. He had a new scar above one eyebrow where a deep hunk of skin cancer had been removed. They were both tired and cranky.
I often heard them fighting in the kitchen, a new sharpness in Grandma’s voice. Maybe their age gap hadn’t seemed so wide when she was thirty-two and he forty-five, but the distance between forty-nine and sixty-two seemed much greater. Arnie’s legs, which had knelt so many times to fix so many pieces of machinery and tie so many fences, ached, and he struggled to get up the stairs to his bedroom.
Grandma had been drinking a lot of beer and taking a lot of medication since her mom’s death. One afternoon, she took me through the entire farmhouse, both stories and the cavernous old basement, to show me where she had hidden things: a wad of cash in a jar, her .38 pistol, exotic trinkets Aaron had collected in the 1940s as a soldier overseas.
“Just in case,” she said, and I groaned.
“Grandma, it’s not like you’re old!”
“Hey, I won’t be here forever,” she said.
She told me seriously that she wanted to be buried without a bra.
“I hate the damn things,” she said. “You can burn ’em at my funeral.”
That was the unsentimental power that came with the struggles of a poor woman’s life: a dry humor rather than a sense of victimhood, an unemotional appraisal of your own inevitable death and the coins you want to make sure your granddaughter finds. In their most sober, aligned moments, the women before you carried that grave strength like queens.
Dorothy, Betty, Pud, Polly, Jeannie—the psychological weight of their lives forced them into profound awareness. It was a way of experiencing the world that higher education has a way of erasing on campuses founded by men who exalted logic and intellect as the only path to knowledge. They had a confidence in their own intuition, a sort of knowing deeper than schooling can render and higher than the dogma of a church. If they could bear the pain of experiencing their world long enough, without numbing themselves, they had what you might call “powers.”
Dad and Grandpa Arnie were mystics, of sorts—a private spirituality that existed apart from their Catholicism. They communicated with livestock, felt a foundation problem in an apparently sound structure, had correct hunches about where water was in earth.
Something about being a woman, though, came with an old wisdom that I feel fortunate to have inherited. Mom could extend her arm over a neat stack of waxy apples in the produce section and feel in her hand, tipped by long fingernails the color of the fruit, which ones were most crisp. It was the energy in them, she said. Betty swore she had psychic dreams as a child until she prayed that they would go away. Pud and Polly talked about good vibes and bad vibes. They all liked the Eagles song “Witchy Woman” and cracked up when it came on, like they had a secret, and in the end the joke was on the rest of the world.
It was real, August. It was a blessing of class, even, in that the academic and professional worlds they couldn’t access would have frowned on it. It was a power no one could take from them. It was a way of seeing the world that they crafted themselves.
7
THE PLACE I WAS FROM
My life has been a bridge between two places: the working poor and “higher” economic classes. The city and the country. College-educated coworkers and disenfranchised loved ones. A somewhat conservative upbringing and a liberal adulthood. Home in the middle of the country and work on the East Coast. The physical world where I talk to people and the formless dimension where I talk to you.
Stretching your arms that far can be painful. As a permanent resident of Grandma Betty’s relatively stable household, I found myself coming and going across miles of highway, hoping never to lose ties with my parents and brother. Most weekends in high school, once I had my learner’s permit, I drove away from the farm on Friday evening. Then, on Sunday, I hugged my immediate family goodbye to drive west down a straight, flat stretch of asphalt back to my dirt-road life with my grandparents. I felt that if I didn’t hold my family together, even as economics tore it apart, no one else would.
I often cried when I drove from one home toward another. In the dark, I rolled down the dirty window of Grandma’s old car, shaking violently at highway speed. I felt a promise to my family: Somehow I’d do well in the world, not just with my heart but with my bank account. I’d pay off all their debts. I’d buy for them what they couldn’t buy themselves, even if it was just a day off work. The idea made my eyes fill with the tears that maybe, on another highway in another youth, Dorothy, Betty, and Jeannie had not let themselves cry.
I stuck my head out the window to see the stars more clearly, to feel the thrill of a cool evening whip my hair away from my face. I felt young and old at once. I felt large in my own skin but small beneath the black sky.
That powerful sky I was under has a lot to do with Kansas culture and its economy. Wichita would become an airplane-manufacturing hub; one of our most famous daughters was Amelia Earhart; our other most famous daughter, of course, is a fictional farm girl who got pulled into another world by a tornado.
Kansans groan when people bring up that movie. If you’re traveling and someone hears where you’re from, they often joke, “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” as though they’re the first person who thought of it.
Yet it is true: I was a Kansas farm girl with wanderlust who watched many storms blow the shingles off our roof. Every spring and summer, heavy air masses moving in opposite directions clashed above us. The horizon was a strip of pink sky between the brown earth and a rolling black wall of cloud. We needed to worry when the sky took a green tint, the air became still, and the cattle huddled against the fence, looking concerned.
We were too far from Kingman to hear the sirens, but when the words crawled across the bottom of the TV screen with a beep, I’d run upstairs to get my boom box, typewriter, journals, and photographs. I’d stash them in the basement with the canned corn and cobwebs, and climb back up the damp steps to run outside and watch the sky.
Grandma Betty would be smoking calmly, watching the Doppler radar report on the evening news. Grandpa Arnie would be worrying about the wheat and trying to get the tractors into the shed before the hail started. About once a year we’d all go to the basement and ride out the storm with candles and a weather radio, then emerge upstairs to see what God had done this time. A tall fence would be floating in the swimming pool, or an uprooted tree would be leaning against the grain bin.
One storm, in particular, stands out in memory. I was a teenager. I ran outside to watch from the north side of the house, between the water faucet and the rosebush ripe and fragrant with pink and white blossoms against the garage where we butchered hogs and cattle. The hail had stopped—the moment of stillness when the trees seem to hold their breath and you can hear a cow shift its hoof in the mud.
The swirling clouds were just above my head, reaching down with little arms of gray, white, black, orange, and green, so low they might touch my face. They spun around a middle void, stretched and grabbed at one another, pulling back into themselves—the beginnings of a funnel.
A supercell, as meteorologists call it, swirling over the plains is still the most beautiful thing I’ve
ever seen. That day was the closest I’d ever been to the center of one. I loved such storms in the way I had loved the dangerous spillway that opened the dam of Cheney Lake and let water crash through while I clung to the safety fence alone as a child. Some sort of pressure was breaking.
No tornado sucked me into the sky, but like so many young Americans in those years I would have no choice but to leave home if I was going to thrive. To do so suited me, I guess. I had long been doing, learning, writing, thinking things that set me apart from the women in my family. But that widening distance sometimes hurt. I had overheard Grandma on the telephone one night, talking to a friend, when I was still just a kid.
“I don’t understand half of what she’s saying,” Grandma told her friend.
Her words were confirmation of what I’d known my whole life: that I was somehow strange to the place I was from. I had fit my origin like a baby fits a womb—awkwardly, nourished by both the good and the bad until she outgrows the space.
Around that same time, I dreamed that Grandma Betty and I were in a 1950s convertible, blue and white like Ed and Irene’s Chevy was in stories. She was driving. It was a warm, sunny day. Grandma pulled up next to a park, where adults and children were buzzing around playground equipment. We got out of the car and walked to the playground. A little girl, about two or three years old, came to me and looked up. I saw her face and realized that it was me as a child.
I looked at Betty. Next to her stood her tiny childhood counterpart, with white-blond hair and big cheeks, wearing a little dress. Amazed, I looked out across the playground and saw that every adult there was accompanied by the child version of herself.
When I woke up, I knew just what I was trying to tell myself. Whatever childhood I’d had was over, whether I liked it or not. I wasn’t a woman yet, but I had been my own mother for a long time. I was old enough to become pregnant with you, but I was also old enough to drive. Old enough to swear that I would never suffer the way the women before me had—not at the hands of a man and not at the hands of an economy.