by Wendy Davis
Fifth grade was also important because for the first time I felt a real connection to a school and got involved in it. When we moved to Fort Worth, people knew my dad was in theater, and because they assumed that singing and acting abilities ran in the family, I would be selected to sing solos in the school plays. But just like my grandfather’s hair-cutting skills, skills having to do with acting and carrying a tune skipped a generation with me. I recall playing a dunce in one of the plays, and undeserved solos in two of the school musicals: Dorothy’s “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz and “O Holy Night” in the Christmas play. My dad told me later in life that my “O Holy Night” solo was simultaneously the most terrible and beautiful sound he had ever heard. But he was still proud. Even when I was awful—and I assure you, I was awful—he was always proud, though he didn’t ever try to falsely convince me that I had talent.
If not for phys ed, everything would have been almost perfect. I was the painful cliché, the one always picked last for sports teams—kickball, softball, basketball—every single time. Waiting for the inevitable moment when my name would finally be called, with the picker giving a grimace and an exaggerated eye roll at being forced to have me, made me feel like a complete and utter loser. The dread and embarrassment are feelings I’ll never forget, and that’s what kept me from attempting to participate in organized sports at school, though I did love playing four square at recess. It was only after my second husband, Jeff, encouraged me to play golf that I discovered I had an aptitude for sports after all—and I later also came to love running and biking especially.
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Books were a whole different matter. I read constantly. Whether we used it as an escape or a form of entertainment, we were all avid readers, especially my parents. Though her formal education was limited, my mom was a voracious reader, particularly of biographies and mysteries—anything she could get her hands on. She started each of us out with collections that were uniquely ours. Mine was the Nancy Drew series, Chris read the Hardy Boys mysteries, and Joey tore through the Bobbsey Twins. We all read the Encyclopedia Brown series and every one of the Boxcar Children books. At school I gravitated toward the Caldecott and Newbery Medal winners—A Wrinkle in Time is still one of my favorite books.
Before my parents divorced, we’d sit in the “formal” living room of our home in Richland Hills, reading. The living room, unlike the den, had no television, and my parents would spend many evenings with my dad’s reel-to-reel playing some popular music of the day—Henry Mancini, Nat King Cole, Petula Clark—in the background. Joining my parents during their quiet reading time with our own books was a joy. I still love putting music on in the background, sitting in my own formal living room, and reading.
During that period in Fort Worth, my mother made an attempt to pay more attention to my clothes than she had before. I was painfully skinny at a time when it wasn’t cool to be skinny—even though the stick-thin Twiggy look was popular among adults, girls my age wanted to look like Marcia from The Brady Bunch or Laurie from The Partridge Family—and I desperately wanted a pair of hip-hugger jeans with the big flare legs that were the style then. I wanted them so badly that my mother finally relented and let me get a pair, but unfortunately, with my skinny, boyish body, I didn’t have the curves for them. To go with the jeans, my mom sewed a little gathered top for me with shoestring ties at the shoulders, made out of fabric with Peanuts characters on it, and then, as a surprise, she cut out some of the characters, like Snoopy and Lucy and Peppermint Patty, and appliquéd them to my new hip-hugger pants. It was such an incredibly sweet thing for her to do, but I was a preadolescent and therefore completely and utterly mortified that she’d done that to my cool new jeans. But they were all I was going to get, and I wore them often.
For a while, our life was very comfortable, and very normal. My dad was making a good living as a regional manager for NCR—he’d bought a nice used car, a big Cadillac sedan, which he was really proud of—and he always dressed well for work. When he was in a play, things weren’t quite so routine and predictable, but still, there was a welcome stability to our life. He’d come home from work at five-thirty or six; my mom would have dinner on the table at the same time every night; Chris and Joey and Jennifer and I would do our homework, and read, or watch sitcoms on television, before bed. In the mornings my mom would get up with my dad and make bacon and eggs and toast and sit at the kitchen table with him while he ate before leaving for work. She’d already have gone back to bed by the time we got up, so we’d pack our own lunches—bologna sandwiches with a package of Hostess cakes, usually—and walk to school. I can see now how hard my mom was trying to create her version of a happy home life for us. She’d sewed that top for me and decorated my jeans, and our family life was more structured and predictable than it had ever been before. She was really making an effort to be a good homemaker and a good mother. More than anything, probably, she was trying really hard to be a good wife.
I wish I could say that her efforts paid off, that my father wouldn’t break her heart—and ours—a second time when he left again a year and a half later for someone else. But that’s not how the story goes.
I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand his compulsion to look for love elsewhere when he was so beloved at home, by my mom and all of us—his family—and when I know he loved us all so much, too. What he was trying to find each time he left my mom and each time he left the women he’d left my mom for, why the urge to escape and release himself from the confines of marriage and home life was so strong inside him—I’m not even sure he understood. For someone like my father, who wasn’t tethered by conventional wisdom or by the limitations of familial expectations, I suppose there was something about being bound by paper after my parents remarried, instead of being bound by choice, that made him feel the need to escape.
FIVE
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
—T. S. ELIOT, “The Waste Land”
EVEN IF FATHER PARKER, the priest who remarried my parents, had known the Spanish term for the divorce my dad got in Juárez before he came back to us—divorcio al vapor—I doubt he would have known that what he was performing for them that evening in Richland Hills could have been called a matrimonio al vapor—a relationship that evaporates after marriage. Which is, in my mother’s version of things and from her perspective, exactly what happened: marriage was what made my father feel trapped, and feeling trapped was what always motivated him to escape. Ironically, getting remarried would mark the beginning of another end.
That end came in the fall, about a year and a half after we moved to Fort Worth. One morning, as we were leaving to go to school, my mom told us to come straight home that afternoon.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
I was excited—I thought it was going to be something good—but of course it wasn’t. Later that day, when we’d come home straight from school just the way she’d asked us to, she sat us all down in the living room and told us the news:
“Your father left last night.”
All children are devastated by divorce, and that proved no exception in our house, but my brother Chris and I were particularly crushed. We were the ones who fell apart right there and right then. And we were the ones who struggled most to find our way through the loss. I think Chris and I felt most attached to the importance of our dad in our lives. He was so important to us—almost every happy memory, every loving memory, came from our dad, and the reality that our family as we’d known it was suddenly over seemed unfathomable. What would it be like without him? He was so focused on us when he was at home with us in the evenings. He was so engaged in our lives, even if it was just to ask us to share a particular television show with him. Playing those strategic games all the time and seeing that gleam of pride in his eyes when we got good enough to beat him. Getting his help with our homework, the way he could teach us anything, even if he didn’t know it, just by
sitting down and reading through a few chapters in the textbook—the way he’d taught Chris his algebra. The evening bike rides around the neighborhood that he and I had started taking together, just the two of us. It was impossible to comprehend his absence when his presence in our lives was so strong. What would happen to those moments? How could they just stop?
Either from shock or disbelief, or both, the first thing I did after my mother told us that my dad had left was to jump up and look for his things. His reel-to-reel tape deck was gone from the living room. I ran to their bedroom and opened the closet. All his clothes were gone. I ran to their bathroom. His shaving stuff was gone. I went to where all his record albums were—all the record albums were gone. Everything was gone.
There was no presage. There was no warning. Given that my father refused to engage my mother in a fight, we didn’t even have the histrionics of arguing to foretell what was to come. He had moved out. And he wasn’t coming back.
At some point that evening, we were made aware that my dad was seeing someone else—I don’t recall if he told us or if our mom did, but when he came over later and took us aside one by one to try to talk to us about it, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. If you had asked me that evening what I was feeling, I would have told you that I was angry. At least that was how I reacted to his attempts to soothe me. All I wanted was to shut him out. But, truth be told, I was mostly scared. When he tried to speak to me, I ran away from him and out into the backyard, where he followed me. It’s a moment I remember still so vividly: me with my face in my hands, crying hysterically, my father with that ever-calm voice of his trying to reassure me that everything was going to be fine.
But it isn’t fine! I wanted to scream at him. And it’s not going to be fine!
But I didn’t say anything. The person I treasured and worshipped most in the world was abandoning me. That’s how I felt. I was terrified at what I would do and what we would do without the balance that he brought, and I didn’t yet have words to put to my fear.
We didn’t sit down to a meal together that night, my mom and us kids, maybe because we were already on our way to defining the new version of who we would be as a family. We drifted to separate places in the house—my mom to her room for the rest of the evening, the four of us to our shared rooms: Jennifer and me in one, Chris and Joey in the other. Our modest house, the three bedrooms all huddled close together off one hallway, was filled with the sounds of our muffled sobbing. Unlike the last time my dad had left and they’d gotten divorced, when I didn’t know or remember a thing, I was now old enough to keenly understand what was going on. My dad was gone.
I’d suffer more this time.
We all would.
It was Chris, I think, who suffered the most. Like me, Chris had always been a fairly sensitive child. And our dad was such a source of calm and support for him. Joey was always the most secure of our trio. Practically born with a permanent smile, Joey had and still does have an ease about him that is rare. He loved our father deeply. But perhaps he depended on him a bit less. Jennifer was only five or six at the time. She didn’t truly comprehend what was happening. But Chris suffered the loss of our father’s everyday presence in our life in an acute and simultaneously chronic way. So much so that even my parents soon came to see that he needed some counseling to help him through it. He was fourteen. Without ever really discussing it, we—Joey particularly—understood that Chris needed our extra love and care. Talking about it years later, Joey would say that he felt that he needed to step forward and be the man of the house. The schism that opened up between my father and Chris from that point on created a deep wound for Chris that was hard to heal. And for the second time, following my parents’ second divorce, I think my father suffered most from the loss of Chris. His firstborn son, with whom he shared a birthday. His love for Chris was always particularly keen.
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Despite what had happened, my mom never spoke an ill word about my father. Not then and not ever. And she wouldn’t allow us to either. It simply wasn’t tolerated. Even at our most hurt, even at our most angry, she gently guided us to be free of our anger at him. She wouldn’t let us go to that place of being mad at him or saying bad things about him. From that first night, whenever I said that I couldn’t believe he’d done this to us and that I hated him, she would stop me.
“Your dad is a good person,” she’d say. “He loves you—he’s still your dad, that hasn’t changed. This is between him and me.”
I marvel at that now, and I marveled at it even then. Once again he’d left her. And once again, at least it seemed to us, for a paramour, someone he’d been in a play with, someone he’d fallen in love with and moved in with—he’d gotten a house, near Texas Christian University, and moved in with her—but still my mother would not say a negative word, though there were times when she certainly could have. She could have made us feel so bitter about him, but she didn’t, and I have a profound admiration and respect for her and consider it one of the greatest gifts she gave us as a mother: that in neither of their divorces did she ever, even for a split second, do anything or say anything to adversely color our perception of our dad. She gave us permission to love him, despite all his faults and flaws, and to find our own way of discovering how to forgive him.
I had no way of knowing what an important life lesson she was teaching me—that the behavior she was modeling would be something I’d seek to emulate in my own life, with my own children, after my divorce years later.
I now know that the unwinding of relationships in general, and of my parents’ in particular, is much more complex than can be summed up by a single cause. And as I grew older, I came to see that my parents’ relationship had likely held together much longer than it otherwise would have, because they worked to make it last for their children. Their mismatched personalities, no doubt an attraction at first, finally weighed more heavily than even the love of their children could sustain. My father, the optimistic, gregarious, ambitious, driven force of nature that he was, simply wasn’t the right fit for my self-effacing, less secure mother. But the bewilderment and loss I felt back then wasn’t shaped by the more objective lens I can view it through today. And there were times when it hit me hard enough that even in public places I couldn’t hide its impact. Even after I’d started junior high, it would weigh on me to a degree that demanded an outlet, like a pressure valve in need of release. I distinctly recall crying in the school hallway, feeling lost and alone. But my dad worked hard to melt through my anger, my hurt, and my fear, and eventually I began to soften.
Ironically, his way back to me and Chris (the hardest to break through with) came through a play, in the very theater where he had met his new girlfriend. He cast the two of us in The Miracle Worker, a play he was directing at the Scott Theatre; Chris was cast to play Helen Keller’s older brother, and I was one of the blind students at the school Helen attended for a time. My scene was very short, but I had to be there for each and every rehearsal, and I remember feeling reluctant and hesitant to be in his world, afraid that I’d be sucked back in. Which I was, of course, by the end of the first evening’s rehearsal. The irony of the play’s title and of my role in it notwithstanding, I wasn’t blind to his faults or to his ability to work miracles in softening my heart. I just wanted to get past them.
—
It took about a year for me to make my peace and to get to a comfortable place with him again. I didn’t want to stay with him for quite some time—I refused to do so while he was living with the woman he was currently in a relationship with, the woman I felt he’d left my mother for. But after a while they went their separate ways, and I started spending a weekend night every now and then with him, sometimes alone and sometimes with Jennifer.
My dad was patient. He worked hard to make his way back to us. And he waited for each of us to be ready to make our way back to him.
Chris, though, would probably tell you
that he was an adult before he really did get all the way there again. The break he experienced with my dad at that point was one that didn’t seem to entirely mend until my dad was in his last days. And even then I could see Chris struggling to make his peace. It was poignant watching him near the end of our father’s life, finally giving in to how much he loved my dad and allowing himself to be present for that and to feel that so he could give him that love before my dad left us, before he took his final breath.
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Many years later I read that, right around the time we’d moved to Fort Worth from Pearl River, one of the longest total solar eclipses ever recorded occurred. Like most things in life, eclipses are relative: what you see depends on where you are when they happen. Seen from the earth, the moon passes in front of the sun, and for a few short minutes—in this case, seven minutes—the moon blocks out the sun and the world goes dark.
Eclipses can happen only when all the planets are on the same side of the sky—in syzygy, from the Greek meaning “yoked together.” Technically, syzygy is when three celestial bodies in a gravitational system are in a straight line. Loosely defined, which it often is, it describes times when all the planets are on the same side of the sun, even if they aren’t in a straight line.
That’s what it was like when my parents divorced: for me and Chris and my mom, the world went dark when my dad left.
We all experienced the divorce differently, from different vantage points and by different degrees, but our lives, individually and together, were forever changed. And though the planets in my family would never be in a straight line ever again, we always remained on the same side of the sun. We were yoked together, as families are, bound by love, and loss, and the grace that comes from finding the healing of our deepest wounds.