Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  —C. S. LEWIS

  THOSE YEARS AFTER my father moved out of our home and before I would do the same were filled with challenges. And though they were difficult, looking back on them, I realize that these challenges formed an important part of who I was to become. In the first few years, until I was almost fifteen, I spent a great part of my time assuming my mother’s role since she was working so much, just as Joey felt he had to become the man of the house after my dad moved out.

  I took over the duties and responsibilities of keeping house, doing the cleaning and laundry, skills I gained in the two summers I spent with my maternal grandmother after my parents’ separation and eventual divorce. These were the summers between my sixth and eighth grades, the summers when I hadn’t quite yet let go of being a child.

  Like the one-on-one time I was able to spend with my paternal grandmother playing gin rummy when we lived in New York, my summers with my maternal grandmother, “Grandma,” were rare treats for me, especially given the dozens of first cousins from her twelve living children with whom I typically had to share her. The chance to spend an extended period with her, all alone, was perhaps the most beneficial fallout of my parents’ divorce.

  Grandma Stovall was a quiet, steady, calming force—and she was a force—at a time when I needed a steadying hand. Her days were filled with the calm that routine and certainty bring. The morning always began with the smell of a hot breakfast, usually bacon and eggs, and the crackling of the grease in which she would fry them. She always cooked in a heavy cast-iron skillet, and, ever the miser, she kept an old Crisco can on her stovetop in which she would collect the grease to use over and over again until it would become too pungent. (Even then, only half of it at a time would be tossed and replaced with fresh shortening.)

  After breakfast, beds were made, the kitchen was cleaned, and the real work of the day would begin. Regardless of where my grandma lived, she always kept a large garden. It was the only thing she knew. Growing, canning, storing, and benefiting from the hard work of spring and summer harvests were in her blood. The hot summers of the Texas panhandle and, later, when she moved to McAlester, Oklahoma, to be near her sister, required that the work be done each morning before the heat of the day became unbearable. Grandma Stovall’s gardens were meticulous. Corn grew in straight, neatly lined-up rows, with potatoes, turnips, carrots, and onions growing alongside in the shadows cast by their tall stalks. Tomatoes were neatly staked. Green beans occupied an enormous portion of the garden, as did black-eyed peas, steady staples for canning. And never, ever was a weed allowed to take root and thrive. A portion of the backyard was always reserved for her chicken pen, and one of my favorite jobs during those summers was collecting eggs from beneath the warm feathers of the mama chickens. Tending to all this right beside her, the quiet way in which she went about her work—these were the most still of times I had experienced in my entire childhood. The schisms between my parents, the constant moving from one place to another when I was very young, and even just the tensions of sibling rivalries—all of this was quieted for me in the escape of those times spent with my grandmother. Each day with her was rhythmic, predictable, safe.

  Afternoons were reserved for the caretaking of the house, and my grandma was meticulous in her attention to detail in keeping it clean. Meticulous is actually an understatement. She was a germophobe, and her obsessiveness required that the floors be swept and the kitchen and bathroom floors mopped several times each week. Coiled rugs were taken outside and beaten with a wide paddle stake that she kept just for that purpose. Nary a speck of dust would ever be seen on a flat surface, and one of my favorite jobs was removing the lamps and starched green-and-white doilies from atop her sofa tables and nightstands to spray them with Pledge and wipe them down with an old diaper.

  As the sun would fade over a typical day, we would retire to her back porch, owning the reward that came from looking out over a neatly mowed lawn, listening to the hum of the cicadas, and taking in the scent of summer. Sweet iced tea, brewed fresh from whole tea leaves in the little yellow enamel-covered metal pan that was reserved specifically for that purpose, and a fresh, round homegrown tomato eaten apple-style with a salt shaker in hand were a typical treat as we sat in her wooden rockers side by side. Thinking back on that now, I can smell it all. I can hear the quiet, punctuated only by our rockers creak-creaking ever so slowly on the wooden porch floor.

  When it was time for canning, our days would end with us snapping beans or slicing cucumbers for pickling. Hour after hour of snapping beans, until blisters appeared on my tender, city-girl hands. I knew not to complain, though. My grandma had no tolerance for weakness in any form. The snapping would be followed the next day by her stovetop pressure cooker hiss-hissing as it readied the beans. And it would not stop until mason jar upon mason jar had been filled with the contents that would take her through the fall and winter.

  There are times when I long for those days. Days when I could step back and see, literally see, the results of a hard day’s work. A tangible outcome that is not so easy to find in my adult work world. The only thing that has come close to matching that has been my public-service work, particularly in the arena of economic development, where I could literally stand back after helping to make a project possible and survey the outcome—the jobs, the human energy and activity, the improvements to quality of life—much like sitting on that porch with my grandmother, looking out over the results of having tended her garden. Rarely was this routine interrupted. When it was, it was usually to walk to town to pay a utility bill or to the grocer. My grandmother did not drive, never had. But she was assiduous about the routine of paying bills on time and using a walking trip to maximum benefit. Never do I remember her putting a stamp on a bill and mailing it off. Instead our legs could carry us to accomplish this task. And whether it was to the “light company,” as she called it, or to the telephone company, we delivered her bills by hand, stopping at the Piggly Wiggly on our way home to buy what little she ever purchased in the way of groceries.

  At night we would sit together at her Formica kitchen table, that same one I sat at while taking dictation from my granddad, and play Parcheesi or Chinese checkers. Sometimes, but not often, we would turn on her black-and-white television, adjust its rabbit-ears antenna, and tune in to the news, but never for long. Having spent most of her life farming, Grandma believed in rising with the sun and retiring with it when it went down.

  The first summer that I stayed with her, my Uncle Jack lived there, too. He was freshly divorced and worked in town. During that summer, and while he occupied the second bedroom, I slept on a cot in my grandma’s room. Or rather tried to sleep, as she could literally snore the paint off a wall. Sometimes I would give up and move to the sofa in the front room, where her snoring could still be heard but where the tick-tock of her cuckoo clock would work to drown it out, all the while lending its own interruption to my sleep. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Steady. Eventually sleep would come. And when it did, I would sleep the sweetest of sleeps. Safe. Everything in order.

  Leaving her home those two summers was as hard as just about any hard day I’d ever had to endure up to that point. Though my grandma was not a physically affectionate person as a rule—there was the one kiss when I would greet her after a long absence and the one hug as I departed to head for home—I still remember what it felt like to be drawn and held to her bosom. Pushing my face deep into the floral housecoat-style cotton dress that was her typical attire, taking in the smell of her rose-milk skin, feeling the roughness of her hand as it touched my tearstained face to draw me near before I would board the Greyhound bus for the journey home—these are some of my most poignant childhood memories.

  The need for the civility, the calm of the order I learned working alongside my grandma was instilled in me during these summers and stayed with me when I would return home. And that is where the caretaking of my mom took root and formed into something that became
all-consuming for a time. It became important to me to re-create, in my mother’s home, the safety of order that I’d discovered with my grandma, for my mom and for me. I found that I had come to need it. And it made me feel good to be doing it for my mom, who was working so hard for us.

  While my mom was working late at Braum’s, I would clean the whole house, and then I’d write her a little note and put it on her pillow for her to read when she got home around midnight:

  Dear Mom,

  I cleaned and vacuumed the living room and vacuumed the den. I cleaned the bathroom and swept the kitchen and dining room. I cleaned the house tonight so that you wouldn’t have to do anything but pick it up tomorrow.

  Sometimes the note was an apology:

  I’m sorry I was too tired to clean the house today, so tomorrow I’m gonna do a good job.

  Or a promise:

  Tomorrow I am gonna clean this house so spotless that you ain’t gonna believe it! And that’s a promise!

  Or a reminder:

  Just a note to say I love you. Sleep well! Remember your pills tomorrow!

  And every once in a while, my note had nothing to do with cleaning and everything to do with the emotional pain that was underneath it all:

  Dear Mom,

  Right now I’m sitting crying so hard that it’s pathetic. I realized tonight how much I love and miss Daddy. I want him back so bad that it really hurts. I love you more than anyone in this world. Thanks for being a mother to me. Thanks for working so hard just for our family. Just thanks for being my mom.

  I love you,

  Wendy

  I see now that my caretaking in our home didn’t help just my mother: it helped me, too. I was trying to find a way to feel good about myself, and I felt good about myself when I did things for her, when I was useful, when I was able to make her life just a little bit easier. Cleaning was an outward response to my parents’ divorce and the pain I was struggling with. It was my way of controlling one small aspect of my life, when everything else felt completely out of my control. It became my way of bringing order to chaos, and I would carry that behavior well into my adulthood.

  I wish I could say that this need to please my mother had held, that it was a pattern I followed until I finished growing up and left home. But after a couple years of that, my teenage desire for social interactions and my normal adolescent desire to separate myself from her took hold. And the rebellion that grew out of it, that grew out of the years of on-again, off-again stability, was something I was at a loss to contain.

  —

  I was around twenty when my grandmother passed away, and my mother asked me if I wanted to have any of her belongings. My mind went back to those summers I’d spent with her, to all the little things in her home that were forever part of my memories of those precious moments: I thought about the stiff, starched, green-and-white doilies underneath her knickknacks; the large velvet wall hanging of a hunting scene with brown-and-white spotted dogs; the coiled rugs; the collection of salt and pepper shakers, including the ones shaped like an old man and woman; the miniature donkeys bearing the inscription MULESHOE, TEXAS.

  Despite the sentimental value I attached to each of those items and so many more, what I wanted most was the little yellow enamel pan that she used daily to brew iced tea in.

  The pan was not an heirloom, of course. It held no value for anyone other than me. But it represented the smell, the color, and the feel of my childhood and the summers I spent with her, all the work we did, everything we accomplished every single day. To this day, I use it to brew tea or to warm soup when I’m not feeling well. That pan reminded me of a time when I understood what it felt like to know my purpose in life, to know exactly why I was here, and to fulfill that purpose matter-of-factly, without drama, without complaint, on a daily basis. Those days were never easy, but the meaning I learned to find in them through her example was simple: Life was about the value of an honest day’s labor and the good sleep that followed it.

  Hard work was the silent prayer she taught me.

  It’s a prayer I learned by heart.

  EIGHT

  His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  WITH MY FATHER GONE and my mom working nights and weekends, we didn’t have parents at home anymore. We became latchkey kids, coming and going on our own, fending for ourselves and looking after one another. My sister, Jennifer, who was so young when they got divorced and so much younger than the rest of us, was very much on her own in many ways. She didn’t have the benefit of all those years of sibling solidarity and tradition that Joey and Chris and I shared, and I’m sure that made her experience even more difficult and painful than ours.

  There was a fearfulness in not having an adult around, in not being parented anymore, in having such a sudden role reversal. Practically overnight we’d gone from being taken care of by our mother to taking care of her. While I assumed the role of caretaker, doing all the housework sometimes with Jennifer’s help, Joey and Chris as the de facto men of the house assumed the role of her protectors. The normal structure of our family had collapsed so quickly and dramatically that all we could do was try to fill the roles vacated by our working parents and keep things going.

  —

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and so, I think, do children. When an important person leaves, you try to fill the emptiness with other people, to glue the broken pieces together. In part, I attempted to fill that emptiness through a series of relationships that exposed me to and set me on a path of religious observance that was distinctly different from the Episcopalian upbringing my parents had fostered.

  My mother’s youngest living brother, Jesse, moved to Dallas to go to Christ for the Nations Institute, a non-denominational Christian Bible college with evangelical roots, in the hope of entering a church leadership role. Services there were the kind where people speak in tongues, have hands laid on them to be healed, and sometimes even collapse onstage. It was all very dramatic, full of the devout belief in the ever-present power of God and a strict adherence to all the historic and original writings and teachings of the Bible, and I became heavily influenced by it.

  Since New York, we’d always been faithful churchgoers, going to Mass on Wednesdays and often twice on Sundays, and we’d been very involved in Sunday school. But the Episcopal religion is very ritualistic, without any of the drama I would come to observe through the Christ for the Nations church, and its services were completely predictable. I’d always liked and felt comfortable with the predictable aspect of our religious upbringing, especially when I was young. It was consistent and therefore felt safe.

  Jesse was my favorite uncle, and from time to time my mom would take us to services at Christ for the Nations’ church on Sundays, and afterward we’d have lunch with him and the woman he was dating, Carole, who became his wife while he was going to school. They were both so sweet and warm and loving, and he became very much like a father figure to me, Jennifer, Chris, and Joey.

  Whenever Uncle Jesse would come to our house for a meal, he’d always bring something to contribute to it, sometimes boxes of dented canned foods that he’d bought at a discount from the grocery where he worked part-time. He also loved to tease me, and I remember particularly one Thanksgiving, as I was happily eating my dinner, he looked at me across the table and asked me if I was enjoying my meal. When I said yes, he started laughing and then revealed to me and the whole table that he had given me the turkey butt to eat. Mortified, I jumped up from the table and ran off crying to the living room, with him following and apologizing profusely. “If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t tease you so much,” he’d often tell me. His brand of showing love toughened my hide.

  Because he was such an influential person in our lives, the church became really influential in our lives, too. I took in those beliefs and the perspective they offered, even if they didn’t always make s
ense to me. I would try so hard when I was in services to have the Holy Spirit speak through me, and I would wonder why it wasn’t happening. Carole, my new aunt, would be standing next to me, speaking in tongues, and I would struggle to let the Holy Spirit flow. But it didn’t happen that way for me.

  At about the same time, Joey and I had, on one of our neighborhood bike rides, discovered a little art guild, housed in what had once been a private residence on a block of homes that had been cleared to make way for a park. Ever curious, we parked our bikes outside and went in to see what was going on. Before long we had convinced our mom to let us take some art lessons there after school. While it became pretty apparent that I was not a budding artist, I enjoyed getting the adult attention we received there. After a few months, the art guild folded and the house assumed a new purpose, this time run by a woman we would come to love dearly, named Jackie. She was about my mom’s age, and she had an inspirational manner that drew people to her. We became part of a cluster of young people who would informally gather there and receive her guidance, particularly her religious guidance. Jackie was and still is a person of deep faith, and her faith radiated from her with a love and warmth we were hungry for. She and my Uncle Jesse shared the same perspective on biblical teachings, and she, too, spoke in tongues during worship services.

  Jackie had an amazing influence on my life and on Joey’s. She was one of the first outsiders to see that we needed an adult who would give us the kind of nurturing and attention we weren’t getting elsewhere at that critical time. Later on, as Jennifer got older, Jackie became an incredibly important part of her life, too. Even after Joey and Chris and I had all moved on and gone away, Jackie still made sure to spend time with Jennifer, giving her some attention every week, because she saw how desperately she needed it. Jackie is still close to all of us, but especially to Joey, who continues to visit with her when he returns to Texas from his home in Tennessee. My mom was very grateful for Jackie’s presence in all of our lives—especially in Jennifer’s—and she and Jackie became close, too.