Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  For years, every visit to El Paso included a McGinney and a trip to Ju'rez. The McGinney was Papa's own creation. He liked to drink a beer before lunch, and when I visited, he would fix me what he called a McGinney, a little shot glass filled with a swallow of cold, foamy beer. I drank Papa's McGinneys until I turned seven. That year, I signed the temperance pledge card that sat in the back of every seat in the pews at the First Methodist Church in Midland. Worshipers were expected to sign the pledge and drop it in the collection plate. Once I signed, I gave up McGinneys, at least for a little while.

  But I did not give up Ju'rez. When they visited, Mother and Daddy would go over at night for dinner or to sit in a club with their El Paso friends. In the daylight, it was my turn to cross into Mexico, with Grammee and Papa and sometimes with Mother and Daddy as well. We'd drive to El Paso, park the car, and walk across the barbed-wire-laced bridge with the river draining below. On the other side, Grammee and Papa would stop for a Mexican beer; then we headed for the open-air market, which beckoned with baskets, embroidered cotton tops, hand-hewn guitars, and wooden puppets. The pottery was my favorite. I ambled from stall to stall, comparing brightly painted birds and red and green leaves on miniature tea sets, carefully selecting my purchase. Today, at home in Crawford and Dallas, I have cabinets and shelves lined with vibrant Mexican jugs and bowls.

  Afterward, we'd make our way back across the bridge, bundles tied and clutched in our hands. But before we could reenter El Paso, each of us had to speak to a U.S. Customs officer. Grammee and Papa made me thoroughly rehearse "I am a citizen of the United States," so I would not suddenly go mute or say the wrong thing. As much as I relished those excursions, the returns always seemed a bit perilous, with the specter of being stuck for days on that bridge, in a concrete and barbed-wire limbo between the United States and Mexico.

  El Paso continued to call to me long after I had grown. I decamped there for a summer in college, taking classes at Mother's old Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, which was now Texas Western and has since been renamed for a third time as University of Texas at El Paso. I came again as a woman in my forties and my fifties, to talk to writers, stroll through art galleries, take in the city and the land. With my friend Adair Margo, I climbed the rugged trails of Mount Cristo Rey to the great cream limestone carving of Christ on the cross, which sits above what had been a favorite mule watering hole for the northern-bound Spanish conquistadors. The last Sunday in October, devout religious pilgrims will crawl on their knees up the same rocky trails to demonstrate their fealty to God.

  There remains something mystical about El Paso, built into a mountain pass that divides Mexico and Texas, sliced by the Rio Grande in its winding journey into the Gulf of Mexico. But perhaps other factors account for the city's magnetic pull. In 1971, a Texas biochemist declared the city's groundwater to be heavily fortified with lithium in its natural state. Some of my longtime El Paso friends say that people who move away invariably find themselves moving back. Because they're not happy anywhere else but in El Paso.

  For much of my early childhood, I was on my way to becoming partially blind. I could not make out anything that was not directly in front of me. I could not see the line of the curb or down the sidewalk or over to the corner. Shiny bikes, birds in trees, all were equally a blur. I finally got glasses in the second grade, and even then it was partly by accident. Midland public schools required their students to read an eye chart. When it was my turn, I could barely make out the biggest letters, and the school nurse sent an official letter home to mother, informing her that I had failed my eye exam. My mother berated herself for allowing me to walk around in this particular fog. She shook her head and said it should have been obvious to her. My mother is also extremely nearsighted. We have the same thing, progressive myopia. By her seventh-grade year, Mother's vision had so deteriorated that Grammee and Papa kept her out of school for a year and sent her to Arkansas, to live with Hal's old-maid sisters, Gertie and Kitty, and "rest" her eyes. The cure failed. Her glasses were as thick as bottles. Mine would be the same had I not been fitted for contacts at age thirteen.

  I still remember leaving the eye doctor's office, my first pair of glasses perched awkwardly on my nose. And then I looked up. I was shocked to see individual leaves on the trees. I knew that trees had leaves, but I had not realized how distinct each one looked, even those of the squat mesquite that brushed over my head as I darted about those vacant lots on Estes Avenue. Midland suddenly came into focus on that sidewalk. But I think this partial blindness and the knowledge that one cracked lens could temporarily plunge me back into that narrow, myopic realm made me more cautious physically and less of a risk taker. When you do not know where edges begin and end, you are frequently surprised by what is hard or sharp.

  My first school was Alyne Gray's Jack and Jill School, which she taught in her modest backyard inside a wooden lean-to shack, where the wind whistled right up against the wood. I started there when I was not quite five years old. It was Alyne's first year of running a school. Alyne's mother, Mrs. Odom, was a friend of Grandma Welch's in Lubbock. My mother recalls how Daddy had been instructed to look out for Alyne when he moved to Midland, and Alyne was told to look out for Harold Welch. They found each other when Mother introduced herself to Alyne across the fence alongside their first tiny home, before they moved to Estes Avenue. That was the shrunken world of Midland.

  Alyne's husband died young, and the school was how she supported herself and her children, Jane and Robert. Daddy later built a new cinder-block school for her on a sandy patch along Garfield Street, in a newer part of town. Because the public schools didn't offer kindergarten, Jack and Jill was the first school for many Midland kids. I met Susie Marinis there among the paste and waxy crayons, and, a few years after me, Alyne would teach a smiling boy named Jebbie Bush.

  Most kids left after one year, but because I was a November baby, I was too young to start first grade. I was five and three-quarters when September arrived, and the schools would not admit any five-year-olds into first grade. Susie was the same, having been born in late October, so we spent another year at Jack and Jill. When I was not yet seven, my parents enrolled me at North Elementary in the Midland public schools. There were, apparently, no rules about how old you had to be to enter the second grade.

  As a result, I was always the youngest in my class, right up through college, when I graduated at age twenty-one, and I think I was a bit immature compared to the other kids, constantly trying to catch up and never quite succeeding. But I loved school. I adored my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Gnagy; I stayed in touch with her until she died. She and her husband rented a house from Mother and Daddy on that Estes Avenue block. Her husband worked as a geologist for Phillips Petroleum in Midland; he had fought in the war and then headed off to college in Kansas on the GI Bill. I don't know whether it was because she lived on our street or because I simply loved school--I loved the bright lead pencils and the thick practice paper and the readers and how letters and numbers would appear and then disappear across the vast blackboards--but I believed with all my second-grade heart that I was Mrs. Gnagy's favorite.

  At recess, when the other kids were running on the dirt in their flat-bottomed canvas sneakers and leaping over whooshing jump ropes, I would stand with Mrs. Gnagy. She would wrap her arms around me, and I would lean against her. The other second-grade teacher, Mrs. McQuestin, would stand next to Mrs. Gnagy and hold her arms around another little girl, Gwyne Smith. Gwyne and I, nestled in the reassuring arms of these teachers, would look at each other while the two adults talked above us and the playground rang with the noise of races and bouncing balls.

  I so wanted to be like Mrs. Gnagy, who was all of twenty-two and a newlywed when she gathered me in her arms. At home, I played school, lining up my dolls on the floor of my room for instruction and Scotch-taping pictures to my little mirror so that it would look like a classroom bulletin board. I taught my dolls writing and reading and solemnly held up picture boo
ks in front of their bright, painted eyes. I always wished that I had brothers or sisters who might sit at their imaginary desks for the lessons, but I happily made do with my dolls.

  I was still very much a little girl. I sucked my thumb at night and in the afternoons, when we put our heads down on our desks to rest after lunch. I'd put in my thumb and twist my face away so Mrs. Gnagy wouldn't see and tell my mother. My parents tried everything to get me to stop sucking my thumb, direly explaining that it was riddled with all kinds of invisible germs. I responded by becoming something of an obsessive hand washer, holding up both hands to walk into the dining room and immediately rushing back to the sink if one of them so much as grazed a wall. Eventually they gave up and waited for me to outgrow it, which I did.

  It was easy perhaps to be sad in Midland, sad from loss, sad from loneliness. "Terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness" were the painter Georgia O'Keeffe's double-edged words about the Texas desert plains, which I read years later, after I was grown. But in our home, where month after month, year after year, it might have been possible to feel sadness or at least an empty veil of loss, we were not sad. Every day, several times a day, my mother and I would hear the hum of the car engine and the slam of the door that announced Daddy was home. He invariably walked in whistling his favorite song, "Up a Lazy River," which was so catchy coming off his puckered lips that our resident mockingbird took up the tune. Along with the dust on his shoes, he always seemed to bring home a funny story about someone in town, not mean or malicious but simply funny, because Harold and Jenna Welch loved to laugh. They laughed at the kitchen table or chuckled in the den over some story Daddy had found in the newspaper. Daddy laughed when he ate hot chilies and jalapenos and his bald head began to sweat, and he would run his napkin through the last remaining strands of his perpetually thinning hair. And he laughed with his friends, many of whom he had known since they had grown up together in Lubbock.

  Mother and Daddy had a wide circle of friends, from Daddy's buddies at Johnny's Bar-B-Q to Mother's bridge group and her ladies at church, where she taught Sunday school. Daddy wasn't much of a churchgoer, not because he was godless but because an hour was a bit too long for him to be without a lit cigarette in his hand. They had their couples friends too, whom they met for dinner parties, and it is that steady rhythm of friendship that I remember so completely from our lives back then.

  We were happy in all our houses, especially in that brick one at the end of the block on Estes Avenue, with its step-down den that had been a garage until television came to Midland and Daddy converted it. The floor was a light red brick and on the hottest summer days still managed to remain cool. Mother had a low marble-top table made to give the room the air of early 1950s sophistication. We watched Your Hit Parade and Ed Sullivan on the black-and-white television. KMID-Midland was the only station, and it didn't come on the air until four o'clock. The very first show was Two-Gun Playhouse, and all the kids raced home from school to sit glued to the old western. KMID stopped broadcasting in the evening, when it signed off with "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a flag and then it dissolved to a test pattern. There was nothing but silence and snow until four the next afternoon.

  Mother introduced me to literature in that house, starting with Golden Book stories about Snow White and Pinocchio. Suddenly I was transported. The curtain on my imagination lifted. We began Little Women when I was only seven years old. I listened curled up with her on the top of the guest room bed--the house had three bedrooms, but we only had use for two of them, so one was set aside untouched for guests--mesmerized by the lives of the four March girls. I can still remember the tears running down my cheeks when Beth died, while alongside me, Mother's eyes welled and her voice cracked as she read the story of this fragile, imaginary Victorian girl who would not live to the end of the novel.

  When second grade was over, we moved again. Off the Estes Avenue block completely, away from the little Collins grocery just around the corner on Big Spring Street and the little toy store two storefronts down. I had spent hours gazing lovingly into its windows at a Tiny Tears doll, who looked right back at me with her bright marble eyes, until one Christmas she found her way into Santa's oversize sack. Our new house was on Princeton Avenue, with a covered carport at the end of the driveway and a giant red oak in the front yard, which Mother had imported all the way from Abilene. The tree was, for both of my parents, the height of extravagance, dug up and moved on a truck, but Mother wanted her full-grown tree, and Daddy was determined that she have it. As with all our other houses, my father had overseen the building of this one, but it was a fancier house, with a front hallway and picture windows and bits of decorative timber to offset the brick. My room was on the corner, looking out across the yard to the street and to whatever else lay beyond.

  My mother set about fixing up what we called "the Big House." It had a turquoise refrigerator in the kitchen and bright turquoise Formica countertops. She picked out turquoise bed skirts for my twin beds and matching flowered coverlets. She kept the books for my father's house-building business, and she cooked. For most of her marriage, my mother made three full meals every day. Even before he began building houses, when Daddy had worked at CIT and wasn't on the road, he always came home for lunch.

  Mother would be up at dawn each morning making coffee and eggs or pancakes. Then she would wash up and prepare lunch. At the end of the day, she cooked dinner. We ate mostly what would be considered Southern or rural food; Daddy's favorite meal was Mother's chicken-fried steak, a grainy cut of meat dipped in egg-and-flour batter and crisp-fried in bubbling oil, with cream gravy and homemade French fries on the side. Both Mother and Daddy had grown up in rural enough towns that the table was set by what was coming off the vine or out of the field. They both looked forward to the corn coming in each summer, and we loaded up on bags whenever we stopped in Lubbock or El Paso. They bought sweet, juicy Pecos cantaloupes, and some years, Daddy planted tomato vines. He also had an onion patch in the backyard because he liked to pull an onion or two for dinner. He grew squash, long and thin and a little bit tough because it never soaked up enough water, even with the hose, to swell up tender and plump. All summer, my mother made squash and chilies for lunch or supper. She called it a famous Texas recipe, but it was squash, green chilies, and Velveeta cheese baked together in a casserole. Or she would make fried squash. In high summer and early fall, we hardly ever ate anything out of a can.

  My mother considered herself a dainty eater, and for her entire life she has been tiny and bird thin, but my dad liked everything, even the jar of pickled pigs' feet that he kept in the refrigerator. He would eat anchovies or smoked oysters on a cracker, and sometimes the raw ones as well. Once or twice, Johnny Hackney, who owned Johnny's Bar-B-Q, would order big barrels of oysters shipped on blocks of ice from the Gulf Coast. Daddy and Johnny and their friends would sit out on a back porch and eat oysters as fast as Big Daddy, who worked the grill at the Bar-B-Q, could shuck them. Mother wrinkled up her nose at the anchovies and the oysters, but I tried them all and loved most of them.

  We ate out too. The fanciest restaurant in Midland was the Blue Star Inn, where they served delicacies like fried shrimp and grilled sirloin. But Daddy said that he loved his Jenna's cooking best of all. He wasn't like the other downtown men, who ate lunch out at a restaurant or ordered at the counter at Woolworth's. And so Mother would listen each day for his car to come humming up the street right around noon.

  I had largely forgotten about those lunches until my wedding. When George and I got married, George was also working in downtown Midland. Daddy stood up at our rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding to give a toast. He ended it by looking at George with a quick wink and saying, "If you go home for lunch, make sure that when you go back to the office, you have on the same tie."

  The main streets in Midland were named Wall Street and Texas and Broadway. From there, they were christened for distant states, like Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri, and also for some of the old ranc
hing families, like the Cowdens and the Nobles. But gradually, as the town spread out into a city and men from the East began to drift in, the street names changed. First they were named for universities, like Princeton and Harvard, and then for the oil companies, Gulf, Humble, Shell, and Sinclair. And then, in the later boom years, when the crosshatch of streets pushed farther into old ranchlands and cotton fields, they had names like Boeing and Cessna, and eventually lofty English names, like Wellington and Keswick and Coventry, which graced subdivision cul-de-sacs.

  We lived on Princeton Avenue now. Our neighbors were mostly company and professional families, whose fathers put on ties to go downtown. Many were geologists and scientists and chemical engineers, men who had studied the science of oil. A few bankers wore suits. But even the roughnecks who worked on the wells in the fields and came home covered with grease didn't walk around in their heavy boots and Wrangler jeans when they came into Midland. The most you might see was the black oil under their nails, which were almost impossible to scrub clean.

  People dressed up to go to church and to go out. At the Blue Star Inn, women wore dresses and did up their hair, while over at Johnny's Bar-B-Q, men wore jackets and ties to sit at the rough picnic tables covered with plastic cloths and drink from cold, dripping pitchers of ice tea. Midland remained a dry town. It wasn't legal to order a mixed drink at a restaurant with lunch or dinner. Johnny Hackney's friends circumvented the rule by wandering back into the Bar-B-Q's kitchen to pour their own drinks from a jug of vodka that Johnny kept in a cabinet.