Nothing I’d known had prepared me for motherhood, and as Vickie and Phillip grew I was scared not to go to the doctor at the slightest hint of sickness. Uncle Howard used to say that Papa killed my grandmother Lillie when she had cancer. Spending all his money on liquor, Papa neglected to take her to the doctor. He also crippled his son Leonard when he refused to get Leonard’s broken leg set. Like the cat sleeping on our warm engine, one day Leonard just took a notion and disappeared. So any time of day or night, if the children showed a sign of a fever or ear infection, I hauled them to the doctor, Edna sitting in the backseat of my car soothing the sick child in her lap.
EVEN THOUGH I read Dr. Spock religiously, as a young mother I was overwhelmed by the fatigue and rawness of my emotions, spinning from tears to frustration in a second. And Phillip, allergic to everything he ate and even his baby blanket and sheets, cried through each night of his first two years. He never slept, despite the soy formula I had shipped on a Trailways bus and delivered to Crow Drugs each week.
Throughout the night, I’d sit in the wooden rocking chair in his room, holding him in my arms. Otherwise, he screamed. Mute with exhaustion, I felt especially vulnerable, as tender as the soft spot on his newborn head. When Charles left for work in the morning, I listened to his car crank up and envisioned eighteen-wheeler trucks smashing into him on the way to work. Then I’d follow my imagined tragic scenario to a vision of me, alone, trying to raise Vickie and Phillip.
Many mornings I brought myself back to reality by admiring the beautiful straw flowers and zinnias outside my bedroom window. One of the first things I’d done when Charles and I settled in that spring of my senior year was plant a flower garden. Mama never did grow anything you couldn’t pick and eat. Planting my annual seeds was comfort I’d chosen a different path. One particular morning after rocking Phillip all night, gazing beyond my blooming flowers, I was struck by the familiar sight of fields I’d known as a child. I closed my eyes and continued to rock Phillip. The truth of the matter was that I was living the same life as my mother.
CHAPTER 3
Going to Work
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
—MARGE PIERCY
EACH TIME I took Vickie and Phillip to the doctor or went to see my own doctor, Dr. Stout, Charles said, “You’re just hunting for somewhere to go.” I didn’t look forward to doctor visits, but I was glad to get out of the house. During the last visit to Dr. Stout’s office, when he couldn’t find anything wrong with my shoulder and knee, both of which had been hurting, he’d commented, “You’re perfectly fine. You just seem a little tired.” I shrugged. He pressed, asking if everything at home was okay. I smiled. Of course it was.
Dr. Stout patted my hand, concerned. “Well, I know it’s not the children. They look fine.” Holding my hand, he continued. “What about Charles? How’s his job?”
I told him that Charles worked as a license inspector for the county. I pulled my hand from his clasp and grabbed Phillip, now about to start school, to stop him from spinning the stool next to the examining table. Dr. Stout started to write something on a piece of white paper, then stopped and took off his round spectacles. Deep grooves cut across the sides of his face from the tight glasses. He wiped the lens with a white handkerchief he took from in his pocket. Placing his glasses back on his face, he commented as he finished writing, “In my experience, if it’s not job troubles, then it’s one of two things.” Finally, I was going to get an answer. “You’re dealing with either an alcoholic or a religious fanatic.”
I shook my head. I’d never thought of Charles as a fanatic about anything, except maybe his coin collection. “No, Charles doesn’t drink. He’s a deacon in our church.” I didn’t say anything else. Neither did Dr. Stout; he simply handed me the piece of paper. I could barely read his scribble. It was a prescription for an antidepressant.
When the door closed behind Dr. Stout, I crumpled up the paper and threw it into the trash can. I couldn’t afford the prescription, and Charles wouldn’t hear of me taking it anyway.
DR. STOUT was right; everything wasn’t fine. I thought about the real answers to his questions on the way home. The only place I went besides the grocery store was the Baptist church. If Charles had his way, we’d have gone to church every day; as it was, we were there at least four times a week. I didn’t know how or when it had happened, but my world had become too small. I still spoke to Sandra some over the phone, and we had dinner with Charles’s family or mine every Sunday, but during these dinners I felt like I was repeating the same conversation. I sometimes worried I’d never experience that sense of wonder you feel meeting a new friend or traveling to a new place for the first time. I was afraid the major milestones of my life, marriage and childbirth, were past. Was it foolish to hope I still had something exciting ahead of me, something even important, that I could have a life of my own?
I had told Dr. Stout that Charles was a license inspector; what I hadn’t explained was the fact that Charles and I had struggled for years to make ends meet. After the GE plant closed, Charles worked part-time at Railway Express Agency. He took the weekend shift that no one else wanted until his supervisor realized how reliable he was and offered him a full-time job. Ten years later the company was sold to Greyhound, so he’d found work as a license inspector, traveling to businesses throughout Calhoun County to verify that the owners were up-to-date with their annual fees. He also checked the status of people’s mobile-home licenses. I worried about his safety—especially after his windshield was shot out. Now the sheriff accompanied him when he issued citations.
What I also hadn’t told Dr. Stout was that Charles’s job was only part-time, and the income, even with his supplement from the National Guard and selling encyclopedias, just wasn’t enough. We had tried to make everything count: eating pinto beans when we were saving for furniture, picking berries in the woods to sell. I even learned to sew the children’s clothes, and I’d go to town and browse the stores to copy the patterns I saw hanging on the racks, just like my mother did. We paid cash for everything we bought, as Charles didn’t believe in credit. The money from the pies I baked and sold to the neighbors and Charles’s unsuccessful peanut-and sweet-potato-growing ventures wasn’t enough—especially when everywhere he worked shut down.
NOT LONG after that appointment with Dr. Stout, I took Phillip to see the pediatrician, Dr. Luther, a tall, boisterous woman who piloted her own plane. I never knew what to expect when we visited her office, decorated with pictures from South African safaris. The summer Vickie caught the measles, she thundered, “Whoever heard of sending a five-year-old to vacation Bible school?” Not once did she let me pay for the children’s medicine, sending me home with boxes of samples when they needed them.
At this visit, Dr. Luther asked Phillip what he’d gotten for Christmas, and he barely answered. She shot her eyes at me, surprised. “Is this the best he can speak?” She signed him up that same day for testing at a rehabilitation center in Birmingham. During the weeks leading up to the appointment, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find myself standing at the kitchen counter eating the cakes Edna baked for us every week. I must have gained twenty pounds by the time we took Phillip for his evaluation.
On the day Phillip was tested the doctors immediately checked to see if he was tongue-tied. I’d thought that was just an expression; to consider it a real possibility was horrifying. Then the doctors put that poor child through every test imaginable. I’m sure they thought that we were straight from The Beverly Hillbillies and didn’t own a refrigerator when Phillip identified the picture of a safe as an icebox. He was right. It looked exactly like the old rusty icebox in Edna’s kitchen, where she stored her sewing material.
The doctors concluded from Phillip’s tests and my interview that he was behind on his speech development because I was so worn out from his chronic allergies and asthma that I didn’t sing and talk to him the way I did Vickie. I’d a
lso taken it for granted that Vickie did all his talking for him, like a little mother hen. He needed speech therapy twice a week to catch up to other children his age.
It tore my heart in two that although I’d given Phillip all I had, still it wasn’t enough. I knew what the doctors had no way of diagnosing: Each day at home, I’d find myself plagued by a discontent I didn’t understand. I was constantly, needlessly restless. I’d hear the dying echo of a delivery truck traveling to its unknown destination, and I’d feel an aching loneliness. I’d been left behind.
THE MARITAL arguments started not too long after Phillip’s diagnosis. I’d taken Phillip to one of his first appointments with the speech therapist. An unusually cold spell had struck that day, and my car broke down on the way home from town. There I was on an empty country road, without one penny to my name and no way to get help. I stared at the flat tire on the dented green Plymouth we’d drained our savings to buy. In pitch darkness, I looked up at the stars and told myself, No more.
Somehow I changed that flat tire by myself, while Vickie comforted Phillip, tired and crying in the backseat. With each twist of the lug wrench, I felt a piece of myself come unhinged. No matter how hard we tried, something always set us back.
With the last lug tightened, I sat back on my heels, my arms aching. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t live without any savings; I wouldn’t raise Vickie and Phillip without a real future.
On the way home, as the headlights illuminated the endless row of tall, sturdy cedars lining the country road, I silently recited the one psalm I knew by heart: the Twenty-third. I glanced in the rearview mirror; Phillip’s head rested in Vickie’s lap. Her head drooped at an awkward angle against the backseat. From the time I’d brought Phillip home from the hospital as a newborn Vickie had been by my side, my assistant mother. Sometimes I thought she had far more patience than I did. I leaned my right arm across the back of my seat, brushing the cold vinyl, to prop up her head as best I could. I wanted to scoop the children up and hold on to them as tightly as possible, never letting them experience pain or frustration again. Turning into the driveway, the gravel crunching underneath the wobbly tire, I’d made up my mind. I was going back to work.
CHARLES AND I argued about it well past midnight. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him be the sole provider—the way things were supposed to be, and had been since biblical times, he said. I couldn’t justify my position in a way that Charles accepted. Countless times in the months afterward we rehashed the same argument: circling each other, the tension in our marriage escalating while my desire for a job grew inside me as relentlessly as kudzu.
When Charles had given Vickie, now in elementary school, only a dollar for spending money for her most recent Sunday-school trip to Rock City in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I was beside myself. Standing in the kitchen trying to follow the recipe off the Campbell’s soup can for the green bean casserole I was fixing for dinner, I shook my head to myself, thinking about Vickie’s embarrassment the day before when she hadn’t been able to buy anything at the gift shop like the rest of the group. I hadn’t had a chance to discuss this with Charles yet, and I was anxious to do so, unable to get anything right all day when sewing or cleaning.
I heard Charles come in the front door, and my agitation increased. I knew he’d take off his blue windbreaker and hang it on the coatrack in the hall before he went to wash his hands. I waited for him to come into the kitchen and sit at the table to talk while I finished cooking supper. When he finally walked in, he started a pot of coffee, a gesture that usually gave me a sense of comfort but that now irritated me. I didn’t ask him about his day like I always did. I barely let him sit down before I said, “Next time Vickie goes on a retreat, she needs more than a dollar.”
He put a spoonful of sugar into his empty coffee cup before he answered. “I don’t know why she needs more than that. That’s plenty to cover her lunch.”
“That’s only enough for a hot dog and Coke. It doesn’t leave anything for the gift shop.”
“She doesn’t need anything from the gift shop.”
“She just wanted a little something to take home. That’s all.” The coffeepot started percolating loudly, the brown liquid splashing furiously against the small glass knob on the metal top.
Charles stared at the coffeepot. “She’ll have to learn she can’t always have what everyone else does.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why Charles thought it was okay for our kids not to have the same opportunities as everybody else. If anyone knew how that felt, it was Charles. He had been the child who carried eggs and butter to school to pay for his lunches, wearing the same three outfits throughout the week. When we were growing up, my family was downright rich compared with his.
“But, Charles, she should have the same as everyone else, or she’ll feel left out. You don’t want that, do you?”
He got up and stood by the coffeepot to wait for it to finish percolating before he said what I knew he would. “I managed without and she can too.”
How many times had Charles told me that he’d survived as a child with less than the other kids and so could Vickie and Phillip? “You know, just because I walked a mile to the bus stop doesn’t mean I think Vickie and Phillip should have to do the same.” I took the green beans I’d snapped and rinsed them one more time before placing them in a mixing bowl. “That makes about as much sense as your mother baking her cakes on Saturday and locking them up until Sunday,” I continued in disbelief. I never did understand why Sunday was the only day sweets and fried chicken were allowed in Charles’s family.
Charles didn’t answer me. He poured his coffee and retreated to the living room with his cup.
“You need to do something about this pile of magazines in the den. I’m tired of the mess,” he yelled from the hallway.
I opened the drawer to find a mixing spoon and slammed it shut.
When we argued we were both on automatic, our frustrations becoming so intense, a thick invisible wall stood between us. We were trying so hard to be heard that we couldn’t hear each other. I didn’t understand some of Charles’s stubborn, crazy notions. We were so different at times. Charles found satisfaction scavenging up and down alleys and roads to find what he thought were perfectly good items someone had thrown away. He’d walk into the house lugging home his latest prize—a broken glass cabinet or lopsided bookshelves that he actually planned to use as furniture in our house. One day he brought home a gigantic barrel of every color of ribbon imaginable. For years the neighborhood women came to the house, staying as long as it took to roll up the endless yards of ribbon they needed.
I loved nothing better than finding a good deal at a discount store, but I wasn’t interested in furnishing my house with castoffs. More than anything, I wanted Vickie and Phillip to have a different childhood than we’d had; I wanted to do more than just get by. Charles had all he’d ever wanted: a wife and family. He liked the predictable routine I’d created—one that meant the car was washed, lawn mowed, cakes baked, and, yes, even the doorknobs polished every week. When I challenged him, I turned his dream upside down. He thought I was saying he was a failure.
I wasn’t. Deep down, I felt like the failure.
SOON AFTER the night I had the flat tire, I started experiencing searing headaches. Sometimes my head hurt so badly, I couldn’t see. I’d had the same “sick” headaches as a young girl. My mother would take me into Piedmont, guiding me up the long flight of wooden stairs to the doctor’s office, where he always gave me a small red pill that made me sleep for what seemed like days. Now, as an adult, I’d lie in my dark bedroom with the curtains closed and a wet washcloth over my eyes, keeping an ear out for the children.
As Charles and I scrambled weekly to pay for gas and speech therapy, he finally considered letting me work part-time. Frustrated with his own part-time job, Charles continued to search for a better, full-time opportunity. One afternoon he came home and told me about an opening at H&
R Block in Anniston, the county seat, only a twenty-minute drive from our house. We went to Anniston whenever we needed something from Sears or J. C. Penney. The job sounded like a good possibility for Charles; but when he mentioned that it was part-time during tax season and that there was a math test to pass, I said, “Let me take it.”
In the fall of 1968, I signed up for the H&R Block tax-preparation course, and I passed the test a month later. The manager who hired me the following January agreed to let me skip lunch and leave at four-thirty to pick up Vickie and Phillip from Mrs. Harris’s after-school care.
I immediately fell in love with the job. I no longer felt so out of sorts, like some pollywog adrift in the water; instead, I had a goal to fulfill. I was paid minimum wage, $2.90 hour, against a draw, which was based on the number of tax returns I completed. The more returns I finished, the more I earned. We were paid $5 for each return, and I quickly devised a system to maximize my effort.
Each day I eagerly awaited customers, sitting behind my desk in my pink dress, navy hose, and white shoes, ready to operate my electronic calculator, the size of a shoe box, whose whirring muted the sound of the receptionist snapping her Juicy Fruit gum. It wasn’t long before the boss’s wife took me aside and suggested that I wear a different color combination. I stuck to polyester pant suits after that. At lunch I sat at my small metal desk, the gray carpet around me stained from coffee spills, and stirred my beef bouillon cubes in my cup of hot water until they dissolved. I kept my bottom desk drawer stocked with boxes of Lipton’s instant chicken noodle soup and Nestlé’s hot chocolate mix. Throughout the afternoon I sipped hot chocolate, my tongue trying to nudge loose the tiny pieces of rubbery marshmallow wedged in my teeth.
I never knew who would come walking through the door from one day to the next. It could be a restaurant owner with years of greasy, jumbled receipts I’d have to sort into order. The time the door swung open and a man appeared in the office carrying a large dry-cleaning box used to store a woman’s winter coat, the other agents averted their eyes and tried to look busy. I offered to help the man. Once he sat down, I handed him several books of matches we always gave our customers from a well-stocked bowl on my desk. He pulled a small ledger from the cardboard box, standing almost as tall as he was. Inside the black leather ledger were pages of perfectly kept records in a tight, neat script. I didn’t ask about his odd record-keeping system, and he didn’t offer an explanation.
Grace and Grit Page 5