Between Mother’s pay as an LPN at Providence Hospital and Mama Dean’s two little old-maid teacher boarders, we got by. They agreed to let Smilin’ Jack visit because “After all, he is her daddy.” Later they’d question me about where he had taken me and how much he had spent with a satisfied, “I might have known, the pig,” attitude. So if the grown-ups in my life were completely opposite, it was never boring for too long.
And then Jerry Roberts came into my life.
We met at a sock hop in the high school gym the summer before our junior year in high school. I was standing on the sidelines talking to Mary Price and some other girls, when I heard, “Do you want to dance?”
When I turned, our eyes locked and it was like we were the only two people in the gym. I don’t even know if I answered him, I just remember stepping into his arms as if I’d always known him, as if I’d been waiting for him my whole life. I wanted to say, “Do you know me? I know you, I’ve known you forever.”
He was purely fascinating to my half-reckless, half-rule-abiding sixteen-year-old mind. He was my age, but seemed older: drove a souped-up ’48 Chevy too fast, wore a ducktail haircut, carried his Marlboros in the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt, and had no curfew. (I loved to think of him as an outlaw.) And as if that wasn’t enough, he had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen, eyes as blue and velvety as pansies, and (wonder of wonders) he liked me too.
But what really got me, what I’ll never forget, is that we could talk about everything for hours. And sometimes, Jerry, my sweet outlaw, read poetry to me.
Of course, everyone else only saw Jerry’s outlaw side. The first time he drove me home from school with the radio blaring and the glass-pack muffler roaring, Mama Dean, who was drinking iced tea and watching Search for Tomorrow, must have come out of her chair like it had given her an electric shock. She went right to the porch light switch and flicked it off and on, my signal to get in the house pronto. When I ignored this signal, which was impossible to see on a bright October afternoon, she threw the old couch afghan around her shoulders and marched out to the driveway.
“Maggie Sweet! What do you think you’re doing?” she said, her jaw stuck out and her eyes blazing.
“We were just talking, Mama Dean,” I stammered.
“Hmph,” she said. “That’s your tale and I’m a’ settin’ on mine.”
After she hauled me red-faced and wailing into the house she went straight to the phone and called Mother at work. In a high, hysterical voice, she said, “Betty, get home. Some rampageous wolf in sheep’s clothing is fixin’ to carry off our baby.”
And Mother came straight home and tried to talk some sense into my head.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. Mother never took time off work for anything. That’s how torn up they were over me seeing Jerry.
Until then I’d mostly done what they said, but I would have walked through fire to be with Jerry.
Between Mother’s speeches of “Listen to me, I’m your mother,” and Mama Dean’s glinty-eyed tales about my philandering grandfather who had deserted her twenty-six years before, I met Jerry every chance I got.
For almost two years it went on this way. Mother was sure that sooner or later her sensible genes would surface and I wouldn’t go back on my raising. But Mama Dean, ever mindful of my grandfather’s taint, followed me everywhere. Since we never owned a car, she was hard to miss. Sometimes during school I’d get that prickly feeling you get when someone is watching you. I’d glance out the window just in time to see a short, stocky woman in a flowered housedress, disappear into the red-tip bushes.
Once, coming out of a movie (Psycho, I think) Jerry swore he saw an old woman in pink fuzzy house shoes dart between parked cars.
Finally one day I caught her. I was in Dixie Burger, having a Coke with some friends, when a gray head peeked through a window, not two inches from my face, then disappeared. I marched out of the shop and found Mama Dean crawling around on all fours pretending to dig in the dirt.
“Mama Dean!” I shrieked.
“Hey, Maggie Sweet,” she said, grinning like she’d been caught with her hand in the collection plate. “I think I lost my house key.”
This time I said, “Hmph!,” and went straight home and bawled to Mother. “You’ve got to stop her. She’s ruining my life.”
Mother said, “Oh, foot, Maggie Sweet!” But she did talk to Mama Dean, who said, “All right! All right! But don’t come to me when her tail gets full of burrs and expect me to curry them out.”
So Mama Dean quit following me and tried to be satisfied with reading my diary, listening in on my phone calls, and getting Miss Skurlock, my homeroom teacher and one of our boarders, to spy on me.
And after a year of just kissing and petting (above the waist but not under the clothes) my outlaw poet was making his own demands.
“Do you love me?” he’d ask, trying to get his hand under my angora sweater.
“You know I do,” I’d say truthfully, slapping his hand away.
“Then prove it,” he’d say. “I’m only human. I’ll still respect you.” And his hands went everywhere and wrestled me to the car floor.
I’d end up crying, and Jerry would say he was sorry. But the very next date was another pure wrestling match.
It finally got so bad that during our senior year we broke up almost every weekend. All this had my nerves so torn to pieces I cried all the time.
Then on Monday, after breaking up Saturday night, there he’d be, waiting for me at my locker, like always. Even though he never said it, I could tell he was sorry. Why, three separate times that spring he gave me a rose and a Baby Ruth. Just like that old song from the fifties, “A Rose and a Baby Ruth.” Now if that’s not sorry, I don’t know what is.
Our last date, the week before graduation, was prom night. Because of my curfew we’d left the prom early so we’d have time to make out at Belews Pond. But this time, when one thing led to another, Jerry wouldn’t stop, even though I cried several times. It got so bad, I just couldn’t control myself. The only thing I could do was to get out of the car and start walking up that dark country road in my turquoise prom gown and strappy high heels, turning my ankles on every rock and crying my eyes out.
The next thing I knew, Jerry was following me in the car, driving real slow, staying even with me. But I was too broken up to so much as look at him. Then I heard his voice. It was so low and hoarse I could hardly tell it was him.
“Get back in the car, Maggie Sweet. For the Lord’s sake, please get back in the car.”
I will never, in all my life, forget how he sounded that night.
When we got back to my house, I told him we couldn’t go on that way and gave him back his class ring.
I cried all week, even in school. I waited, hoping he’d come to my locker like always. But this time he didn’t. I lost five pounds and was jumpy as a cricket. Kind of like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass when Warren Beatty wouldn’t take “no.”
All I could think of was getting Jerry back, so I made up my mind. If I wanted him back I had to do something daring. Even if it meant hardening my heart to Mama Dean’s tragic broken figure, and the hurt in Mother’s eyes, graduation night, I’d do it. I’d give myself to Jerry.
Chapter 2
Graduation day dawned hot and bright. I woke early, too excited to sleep. But even after I was awake, I stayed in my room a long time trying to memorize every detail of this important day. I heard the whir of the electric fan, Mother and Mama Dean’s voices coming up through the kitchen air vent. The curtains stirred at the opened window and the sun cast shadows on the blue forget-me-not wallpaper. I breathed in the crisp new smell of the yellow polished-cotton graduation dress Mother and I had bought on a shopping trip to Lerner’s in Charlotte. My face in the mirror was pink with excitement, and I told myself to remember the light, the sounds, the heat, the very air of this June morning. Because tonight, when I came back to this room, nothing would be the same.
After I dressed, I dabbed Tangee Natural on my lips and Vaseline on my eyelashes. Then I thought about the Maybelline cake mascara and Firecracker Red lipstick Mary Price and I had bought at Woolworth’s and hid in the back of my chifforobe. It would be the perfect day to try them.
Then I remembered our principal’s announcement over the PA during graduation practice: “No earrings, teased-up hair, or loud makeup for graduation. Y’all are supposed to look like fresh young ladies, not New York City si-reens.” We all laughed at the way he had said sirens, but there was no doubt in our minds he’d send us home to change, even on graduation day.
So I used extra Tangee and hoped for the best. At the last minute I sneaked into Mother’s room and dabbed some Evening in Paris behind my ears. If I couldn’t look like a si-reen, at least I could smell like one.
Mother and Mama Dean were putting pink rosettes on my red velvet cake when I finally came downstairs in my cap and gown. They’d even decorated the living room with red and gray crepe paper streamers, Poplar Grove’s school colors.
“You’ll be getting your biggest surprise later,” Mama Dean said, winking at Mother.
I was too busy thinking about my surprise for Jerry to ask any questions.
When our class marched up the aisle to “Pomp and Circumstance,” I could see Mother and Mama Dean seated near the front of the auditorium, fanning themselves with In-Your-Time-of-Need-Call-Sim’s-Funeral-Home cardboard fans.
Mama Dean bawled so loud everyone turned and stared at her as I walked across the stage for my diploma. Mother, who looked cool even in ninty-degree heat, sat straight in her chair and looked prouder than I’d ever seen her.
For a minute I felt guilty as homemade sin for what I was planning to do later. But the minute Jerry’s blue eyes met mine across that crowded stage, I knew tonight had to be the night.
When we got back to the house for the family party, Smilin’ Jack’s new pickup was parked in the driveway. Daddy was married to a nice country woman named Willa Mae now. They both had steady jobs at a hosiery mill and had bought a cute little house on the outskirts of Chapel Hill.
Daddy was getting downright respectable.
For my graduation present, he and Willa Mae gave me a complete Blue Waltz perfume set, dusting powder and all. Mother and Mama Dean had gone in together and got me a Bulova watch. Miss Honeycutt and Miss Skurlock, our boarders, gave me a mustard seed necklace (“If you have the faith of a grain of mustard seed…” Matthew 17) and a Cross pen and pencil set.
Then over cake and punch, Smilin’ Jack told me about my graduation surprise.
He’d paid my tuition, in full, to the Chapel Hill School of Licensed Practical Nursing. He’d even found me a summer job at a Tastee-Freez near his house. I’d be moving in with him and Willa Mae within the hour.
I grinned nervously at Mother and Mama Dean, sure that any minute one of them would say that Daddy was just teasing or that this was just another one of his “damn-fool notions.” But the smile quickly died on my lips. Mother and Mama Dean were actually packing my suitcases.
“Maggie Sweet, we’ve been so worried about your future,” they both said, their voices high with emotion, their eyes bright with tears.
I was really leaving. My future had been decided.
Even now, I can hardly believe that I did exactly what I was told. But that’s how it was back then. Except for sneaking around to see Jerry and smoking Kools with Mary Price, I did what I was told. It just never came to me to do any different.
Besides, I don’t think I really believed it was happening. For years I’d had my whole life planned out. And Lord knows, being a nurse and leaving Poplar Grove were not in my plans at all. Everyone knew that all I wanted in the world was to marry Jerry and go to the College of Cosmetology on Bud Hollings Street behind the Western Auto.
I even planned to have my own shop in the back of our house some day. I’d call it Styles by Maggie Roberts. Now you’ve got to admit that has a nice ring to it.
I spent entire study halls writing “Mrs. Jerry Roberts” and “Styles by Maggie Roberts” over and over in the margins of all my spiral notebooks.
Why, I’d been in love with Jerry for years and doing hair since I had to stand on a chair to reach. By the time I was twelve I was trimming bangs, giving Toni home permanents, the works. I was good at it, too. Everybody said I had a real flair. They even rhymed it. “Maggie Sweet has the flair—for fixin’ your hair!” I thought that sounded good, like the commercial “Winston taste good—like a cigarette should.”
When I was sixteen, I got a part-time job as a shampoo girl at Shirley’s Curl & Swirl, the busiest shop in town. I loved the scent of sea breeze and apple-pectin shampoo, the clutter of brush rollers, double-prong curl clips, and Dippity-Do; the mingled hum of Bonat hair dryers, women’s voices and laughter. I loved it when plain little women handed Shirley pictures of stars like Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, saying, “I want to look like that.”
Shirley would wink at me and whisper, “Who don’t?”
Then she’d tease and curl and spray, and somehow the customer grew hair and confidence right before my eyes.
I’m not sure what I loved the most—Shirley and the other beauticians treating me like I was the same age as they were or watching customers float out of the shop, looking good and knowing it.
When Shirley told me I had the gift, I thought I’d died and gone to beauty heaven.
Now here I was about to become a nurse. About to trade brush rollers for bedpans.
During all the confusion of packing, I tried to sneak a phone call to Jerry.
Nice girls didn’t call boys in those days, and we weren’t even going steady anymore, but I was desperate. I let the phone ring and ring, but nobody ever answered.
By the time I called Mary Price, I was crying so hard, I could hardly talk. I figured if anyone could get me out of this it was Mary Price. But the only thing she could think of was stealing her daddy’s truck and the two of us running away. When she started bawling too, I knew I was stuck. But Mary Price promised to call Jerry for me and to write every day.
All the way to Chapel Hill, Daddy tried to cheer me up by telling knock-knock jokes. But all I could do was stare out the truck window and cry. I kept hoping it was all a bad dream, that any minute I’d wake up.
Later when I’d settled in with Daddy and Willa Mae, I wondered how Mother and Mama Dean had guessed about my graduation surprise for Jerry. They had to have guessed. In all my eighteen years they’d never sent me home with Daddy before.
Mary Price, who was going steady with Hoyt Bumbalough, Jerry’s best friend, kept her promise and wrote every day.
Dear Maggie Sweet,
Jerry has taken a distant turn ever since you two have parted. Why, me and Hoyt hardly ever see him anymore. No doubt seeing us together reminds him how much he misses you. Any day now, I look for him to carry you back to Poplar Grove with a diamond on your third finger, left hand. It’s only just a matter of time. You and Jerry are the cutest couple ever. (Except for Hoyt and me. Ha Ha.)
Maggie Sweet and Jerry
Mary Price and Hoyt
Together 4-ever
Your best friend,
Mary Price Teeter
Her letters were so convincing I believed every word. I tried to stop brooding and told myself that soon, very soon, my dreams would come true. Jerry, my knight in shining armor, would rescue me in his Chevy, carry me back to Poplar Grove, and we’d live happily ever after.
Two long, lonely months went by without a word. By August, I was so full of longing and empty of pride, I broke down and wrote Jerry a love letter, scented with To a Wild Rose by Avon.
A few days later, Mary Price wrote that Jerry had married a girl named Brenda Faye Espy from Carrboro. The wedding, a shotgun affair, took place at the courthouse, Saturday.
Mary Price added loyally, “PS#1 Jerry went off and joined the Navy. Good riddance to bad rubbish! He never was good enough for you anywa
y and everybody says the entire Espy family is nothing but pure-D-trash.
“PS#2 I broke up with Hoyt too. Like I told him, anyone who could be best friends with someone as no-account as Jerry Roberts can’t be worth shucks himself.”
I did appreciate Mary Price’s sacrifice of breaking up with Hoyt on my account, but when I got that letter I went all to pieces. I just couldn’t believe the person I loved best in all the world had married someone else.
For four days, I stayed in the bed, played Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and cried my eyes out.
Poor Daddy didn’t know what to do. He kept bringing me Goody’s Headache Powders and cold cloths for my head. When that didn’t work he tried Midol and the heating pad.
On the fourth day he threatened to call the doctor to come give me a nerve shot. That’s when I pretended to feel better. Not because of doctors and needles, like Daddy thought, but because I could see I was scaring him and Willa Mae to death.
For the rest of the summer, I sulked around the house, took up smoking on the sly, and tried to avoid Daddy’s worried eyes. When I wasn’t working at the Tastee-Freez, I stayed in my room, dressed in black, cried, and played the same sad records over and over again.
That whole long, lonely summer, all I thought about was Jerry. It was my fault he was married. My fault it was over between us. I’d broken up with him, then left town. He couldn’t have known I still loved him. That it wasn’t my choice to leave. If I hadn’t broken up with him on prom night, if I hadn’t always said no, maybe we’d be married and happy right now.
But outlaw boys never stayed with girls like me, I’d known that along. They married smart, fast girls like Brenda Faye.
Until that summer I’d always believed I was special, that I’d marry for love, do work that made me happy. Now life stretched out before me, flat and bleak, without Jerry or beauty school, without hope at all.
Maggie Sweet Page 2