by Wendy Davis
My mom’s letter was not a plea for his return. Instead it was short and informational. She told him that Chris had started school and gave him a few updates about Joey and me. He answered her instantly. And thus began his journey back to us.
He followed that first letter with more, each imploring my mother to allow him another chance. He must have told her that he loved her, that things would be different this time, that he’d changed. Despite his written pleas and phone calls, which were undoubtedly persuasive, she refused to let him come back unless he was divorced.
That’s when he found out about Juárez, Mexico, and made a plan to meet my mother, and us, in Arizona, where he would collect us and take us to El Paso with him.
Juárez was the home of the “quickie” divorce, the place that could “untie marital knots with speed and ease.” In Mexico they were called divorcios al vapor—divorces granted quickly as marriages were evaporating—and in the 1960s, travel agencies north of the border offered packaged trips to Juárez, nightclub tours and gossipy tales of the vaporous celebrity divorces: Johnny Carson, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Norman Mailer, Lauren Bacall, to name just a few. Until the law was changed in 1970, an unhappy spouse could cross the border from El Paso into Juárez in the morning, sign the court clerk’s ledger at the Municipal Palace, and pay one dollar for a slip of paper that gave the petitioner instant residency, instead of having to wait six weeks for residency before a divorce in Nevada or Idaho. In two hours, one’s divorce papers were ready, along with the freedom to remarry later that same day in the same courtroom, all while the other person involved in the divorce wasn’t even there.
My father drove from West Warwick to El Paso and then on to Juárez in the old Volkswagen Beetle he owned then. And my mother loaded us into that same sedan she’d had since we lived in Rhode Island and drove us to Arizona to live for a while with her brother Raymond. There we would wait the few months it took for my dad to establish himself in El Paso. He took a job at Der Wienerschnitzel and lived at the YMCA for three months, working to save up enough money to rent a house for us. Once he accomplished that, he took all the seats out of his VW Bug except for the driver’s seat, then drove to Arizona, where he loaded our belongings into it and towed it behind his newly reunited family in the sedan. I was almost four. And I finally had a father.
Like most of West Texas, El Paso is flat and dry and hot, with the rugged terrain of a small nearby mountain range—the Franklin Mountains. Many of the streets then were dusty, lined with small box houses with cement yards and dirt driveways and chain-link fences, but unlike other parts of Texas, it’s home to two of the biggest military complexes of the United States Army: Biggs Army Airfield and Fort Bliss. We moved into one of those small box houses, onto a street called Vulcan Drive, in an area where a lot of military families lived, and started over. My dad continued his job at Der Wienerschnitzel, back then a popular and growing chain of fast-food hot-dog restaurants—I distinctly recall him leaving for work in his little paper hat, and I recall even more distinctly the Tijuana Brass album that he brought home as a free gift from the restaurant and that we played over and over and over again. The tunes are forever emblazoned in my mind, and hearing Herb Alpert’s trumpet is an instant path back to that time in our lives, the first memories I have of us as a real family.
It didn’t take too long before my dad began to pursue something more for himself than his hourly-wage job. He began to seek a more “grown-up” job, one that would better support our family, and when he was around thirty, he got one with National Cash Register. It was a job he wasn’t qualified to get, much less even apply for. The company had tried to turn him away, telling him that they didn’t hire anyone without at least two years of college—he had only a high-school diploma—but true to form for my confident, optimistic father, he didn’t take no for an answer. Instead he convinced them to let him take the test they gave to prospective hires, and he landed the highest score anyone had ever gotten on the test. Needless to say, he got the job.
That story sums up exactly what my father was all about. He was brilliant, truly brilliant, and he never, ever gave up. Once he was determined and fixated on accomplishing something, nothing could get in the way of it. That was true of his pursuit of acting roles. It was true of convincing my mother to reunite. It was true in the job arena. And it was true with his amours.
When he started that job, his motivation was to make a good living and a nice life for himself and his family. Later his motivation would change and he would have other, less practical goals, goals that had nothing to do with financial stability—his or ours. His focus would become all about following his heart, his true passion, and he would sacrifice everything to pursue the thing he loved most in the world—the theater. Following his dream would change his life, and ours, in ways we never could have imagined.
But in those early days in El Paso, the hum of daily life continued. My brothers and I spent most of every day playing outside together in the hot, dusty yard; my father went to work and came home; my mother had her good days and her bad ones. Soon my sister, Jennifer, was born. What had fallen apart had been put back together; the center was holding. We were, for better or worse, a family again.
—
One of my mother’s favorite shows to watch on television when we lived in El Paso was that strange, campy soap opera Dark Shadows. Sometimes she would let us watch it with her in the afternoon. I was absolutely terrified of Barnabas Collins, the “romantic” lead in the form of a bat who transformed into a vampire, and watching the show gave me nightmares. “I’m not going to let you watch it anymore!” my mother would say, annoyed, whenever I’d had a bad dream. And every day I’d beg to watch it again: “Please, please, please!” I’d plead. “I promise I won’t get scared!”
But I always did get scared. Bats flew through our yard most nights at dusk in El Paso, and when they did, I was certain that one of them was Barnabas Collins and that he was coming to bite me.
What haunted me even more than Barnabas Collins were the dark shadows of my parents’ marriage, the volatility of their relationship, which manifested itself most prominently in my mother’s reactivity to my father’s behavior. The years in El Paso marked another difficult time in my mother’s life, and thus in her children’s.
Whenever they would fight, it was my mother who would become hysterical—screaming and crying and throwing things—while my father would remain calm. He never argued with my mother, never raised his voice at her—or at us—which was probably maddening to her and made things worse. It must have felt to her that he was being dismissive of her feelings. In one of my most vivid early memories, I’m standing at our small bathroom sink, giving my one and only doll a bath, her blond hair straw-like as I worked a bar of soap through it. My mother is screaming. She is crying. And before I know it, as I cautiously peek into the kitchen to see what’s going on, she’s out the back door with our dinner plates in her hand, throwing them one after the other at the concrete wall. I still remember seeing her there, shards of our Pyrex plates all around her, crying, her anger faded and her sorrow taking its place. And my father—still in the kitchen—calmly looking out the back door to examine the damage he had indirectly wrought.
On another occasion, when my dad had returned from rehearsing a play in which he’d been cast, I recall a similar outburst on my mom’s part—this time she met him at the front door with his suitcase packed, throwing it out onto the front lawn, where it broke open, his clothing spilling out everywhere. I did not understand it then. But I came to as I grew older. Typically these episodes arose as a result of some jealousy on my mom’s part. I can’t say with any certainty whether they were motivated more by fear or reality, but I do know that my mother suffered from a deep insecurity because of my father’s history.
If he gave her cause, and he likely did, to believe that he was romancing someone on the side, I can hardly blame my mother
for her rage and anger, but living with her tirades was traumatic.
As her fiery parents did to keep their brood in line, sometimes my mother’s fire would direct itself at us. Like many parents of the era, she did not believe in sparing her children the rod. My brothers and I have vivid memories of being on the hurting end of a belt or a switch when we would spark her anger.
“That’s just where she came from,” Joey’s always said. “Her daddy made part of his living training mules—tying them to what they called the ‘snubbing post’ and teaching ’em who was boss. That’s how they horse-trained back in the old days. And that’s just the way things were. It was a hard life.”
Eventually, though, my mom rejected that perspective. I distinctly recall an afternoon, having been told to go get a belt of my dad’s from their shared closet, the three of us—Chris, Joey, and I—lined up for an expected spanking. But instead, my mother waved us away and began to cry. She never laid a hand on us again.
Sadly, I do not have memories of my mother nurturing us in any physical way during that time. Though I know she loved us. She made sure we always had books to read, and she encouraged our love of them. She was a stay-at-home mom, who provided for our basic needs without fail—three meals a day, a clean house and clothes.
I believe that even though my parents managed to survive whatever it was they were going through at that time, my mother’s unhappiness continued to impede her ability to love us demonstratively. She just didn’t know how. And because she felt so intimidated by her lack of formal learning, she’d never really ventured into the world to try to create a life for herself outside of us, which was pretty typical back in the sixties—a lot of women were stay-at-home mothers, though they weren’t called that then, and there was no shame in it at all. Only, she wasn’t the kind of stay-at-home mom who participated in our schooling or got involved in volunteering or any other kind of parent-and-child-oriented activities. She lived a very isolated life; the only time she would ever come into contact with other adults was when she would go watch my father rehearse at the theater.
We spent quite a bit of time doing that—watching a show being blocked and seeing the way a production unfolds over time. I don’t remember a time when my dad wasn’t performing, and it seemed perfectly normal to me that that’s what he did. I thought that’s what everyone’s dad did. I idolized him and thought he was a total superstar because he always had the leading role. We never failed to go to the production itself when it was presented in front of a live audience, and he’d invariably get lots of acclaim and applause. I was so proud of him.
I know that my mom was proud of him, too. She and my dad had made a simple coffee table out of unfinished wood, affixed legs to it, painted it avocado green, and had a piece of glass made to fit the top of it exactly, and it was under that glass that my mother put newspaper clippings from all the different shows he was in. That table followed us to at least four of the cities we would later live in as my dad’s job transferred us from place to place. And in each one the collection under the glass grew. All those memories collected as a daily reminder for us of my dad’s talents and our pride in him. Ultimately, when my parents divorced for the second and final time, my father would take the coffee table with him and we would be left with neither him nor our collection of shared memories from his plays, captured in newsprint under the glass.
THREE
You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CHILDREN WHO MOVE FREQUENTLY adapt in different ways. Either they try to overcome the social awkwardness of always being the new kid and never knowing anyone in the room by being very outgoing, or they retreat into themselves and become painfully shy. I was the latter of the two, and “painfully shy” does not even begin to describe me. They say practice makes perfect, but I don’t think that saying applies to moving. It never got easier for me.
Each time we moved was traumatic, each first day at a new school terrifying. Up until my first day of school in El Paso, I hadn’t had much contact with other children, or other people, outside my family. For some reason my mom hadn’t sent me to kindergarten in El Paso, and, looking back, I realize that my siblings and I had never really been socialized because she herself had not ventured out into the world very much. Except for playing with my two older brothers—especially Joey, who was just one year older than me—I hadn’t interacted much with other people. None of us did. Which meant that even the most basic and fundamental social skills most children have at that age were a complete mystery to me. I had no idea how to play and make friends with other kids, and, more important, I had no idea what it felt like to be comfortable in my own skin around others.
My first day of school ever was my first day of first grade just down the street, and while I have no actual memory of that day, I do know we would have walked there, Joey and Chris and I—we would always walk to school, no matter how young we were or what the weather was. But I do remember being entirely reliant on Joey. We’d always been constant companions, and now that I had to go to school and be around other people—people I didn’t know—I needed him even more. I’m not sure how I would have survived without him.
However acute and painful the adjustment was to my first new school—and it was acute and painful—it didn’t last long. Before I’d even finished first grade, National Cash Register transferred my father to Oklahoma City. There we lived in a modest house, but in a nicer, more suburban-style neighborhood than where we’d lived in El Paso. I finished first and started second grade there. My first-grade teacher was Mrs. Gary, and I thought she was the most beautiful, wonderful woman I’d ever seen. She was nurturing and kind, and she had a thick head of long red hair that she wore down, and she loved to read to us. My favorite of the books we read together was Charlotte’s Web, and we named our school guinea pig Wilbur at my suggestion; she praised me for thinking of that. Mrs. Gary was also very impressed with my reading skills and often would have me read to the class when she needed to step out for some reason or other. She made me feel special, loved, and smart. It’s funny how you remember small things like that, little kindnesses that adults show at a time you need them most. I was so hungry for that kind of encouragement, and I soaked up every ounce of it.
While we lived in Oklahoma City, my paternal grandparents came to visit, and though I didn’t know it, it would be the last time I would ever see my paternal grandfather. He was such a kind and warm man, and I loved him so much when I was a little girl. I have vivid memories of the special way that he treated my brothers and my sister and me. Because my dad was an only child and we were all my grandfather had in that regard, he just adored us. We were the light of his life.
My grandfather always loved showering us with little treats, and I remember on one occasion during that last visit going to the 7-Eleven with him. He instructed us to just go in and get whatever it was that we wanted. Of course, we were the kind of children who had never been told anything like that before, and we didn’t really know how to respond, so we each selected a few pieces of candy. I selected one of those magnetic toys where you move the iron filings around with a little pen and put a beard and hair on a face. When we got home my mother scolded him for spoiling us, but with enough of a smile on her face so that we knew she wasn’t really upset.
Oklahoma City is also where I recall my mother doing something really thoughtful for me. Birthdays were never a big occasion in our home. My mother didn’t believe in making a fuss over someone’s birthday, and I have no doubt that’s because when she was a child there wasn’t the possibility or the privilege or the luxury of providing any kind of birthday recognition for her many brothers and her sister. So in our family the same was true. Usually my mother would make us a Betty Crocker cake mix, plus a can of frosting, and we could pick out the one we wanted at the grocery store with her. But on this occasion, when I was in second grade, my mother had taken me earli
er in the day to buy a new pair of sneakers, and when my dad came home from work and we were at the dinner table, my mother said, “Show your father what you got for your birthday today.”
I showed him my sneakers, but I was secretly disappointed because I had really been wanting a pair of roller skates. And then my mother put a bag on the table. “Here,” she said. “This is for you, too.” Inside was a pair of roller skates, the kind you just slip your shoe into and tighten up with a key—not exactly the ones I wanted, but I was happy nonetheless and spent the rest of that evening and many days afterward trying to learn how to skate. It was one of my few memories of my mom showing some warmth and an attempt to do something special for me when I was that young, and it’s always been a cherished memory.
—
Within a year, though, my father’s job transferred him again, and we left Oklahoma City for California—Chula Vista, a suburb just outside San Diego. As they had been in Oklahoma, things were calmer at home there than they’d been in El Paso, but my experience at our new school knocked me off the sense of balance, confidence, and calm I’d been settling into in Oklahoma City. Joey and I went to an experimental, open-concept kind of school—there were a lot of new education concepts at that time—and this school had four classrooms that opened up onto a central and circular kind of “pod.” I was finishing my second-grade year, but we weren’t really classified in that way. We worked at our own pace without any formal or traditional structure to our learning day. Instead a mix of elementary-school-aged children worked by floating from room to room to room around the pod, depending on the subject area and our skills and ability in that area.
Structure gives children a sense of certainty, the knowledge of what to expect and count on throughout the day, and a feeling of order and continuity and security. The unstructured architecture and teaching style there completely distressed me. I remember going to the individualized reading box and making my way through all the colors of the graded reading material—the purple group and the red group and the blue group and so on—and if I spent too much time with the reading box, someone would gently try to steer me toward science or math. But no matter how self-motivated I was, I never got used to the lack of direction and guidance and the absence of an imposed schedule—things that are so important and so comforting at that age, especially to the kind of child I was. For me, the lack of structure was deeply disturbing and had a profoundly unsettling effect on me. As bizarre as it may sound, I was anxious and scared the whole time I was there, too timid to even ask to use the bathroom, since regular times to go line up weren’t set aside the way they normally are for children that age. As someone who craved stability and predictability, I felt utterly lost at the lack of walls and limits and a regular daily schedule.