Rita Will

by Rita Mae Brown

For instance, in the late 1920s both Mom and Aunt Mimi worked. Young and pretty, they enjoyed a whole circle of friends and admirers. Lunch break meant everyone met at the drugstore. One particular summer day, Mother and her sister dashed to lunch. They had to cross the railroad tracks. An ambulance was parked at the tracks with a large wicker basket, bloody at the bottom, sitting next to it. A few people stood around.

  Remember, a small town. Everybody knows everybody.

  Mom marched up and said, “What happened?”

  The ambulance attendant informed them a man had been decapitated by the train.

  Aunt Mimi wanted to know who it was.

  The fellow said they didn’t know. The body, wrapped in a sheet, was in the ambulance. He added that the head was in the wicker basket. Mother lifted the lid, reached in, grabbed the head by the hair and hoisted it up.

  Aunt Mimi said, “I don’t know him.”

  Mom responded, “Me neither,” and dropped the head back in the basket.

  They walked on to lunch.

  Tough girls. Mom was, too. She could view blood, guts, brains—nothing fazed her.

  Well, that became the dead-head story. It turned out he was a drunk who fell asleep on the tracks.

  What happens to children and families today who sit around the television? They’re watching made-up stories. It’s not their experience and it’s not truly shared. A human being must learn at a very young age how to connect to other human beings. Our technologies are driving us apart, only connecting us in terms of information, not in terms of emotions.

  Furious as Mom and Aunt Mimi made me, they taught me how to link up with other people, to feel for others. Best of all, they gave me their histories, the history of our family. They didn’t bother to clean it up. Apart from the thrill of hearing about feuds, duels, sex scandals and eerie events, I learned that people aren’t perfect and neither was I. You love them as you find them. Occasionally, they’ll love you too.

  33

  Blue and White

  Citation stands in the middle of a reflecting pool with lily pads at Hialeah. This statue inspired me. Getting Mom to drive me there on nonracing days utilized all my persuasive powers, since she only wanted to go where horses were running. I’d lure her by saying there was a daughter of Swaps or Needles in the shedrow. The great horses at that time were Nashua, Needles, Swaps, Native Dancer and Bold Ruler. There were other fine horses but those caught the public’s attention.

  She’d prowl the shedrow while I scampered off to the part of Hialeah forbidden me.

  For those of you interested in horses, let me recount Citation’s lineage. Foaled in 1945, he was by Bull Lea out of Hydroplane II. On the top line, the sire line, his great-grandfather was Teddy. Tom Fool, foaled in 1949, another fine horse, also carried Teddy blood but on the dam side.

  Citation could run in anything at any distance, which is the mark of the highest level of equine athlete. He could sprint. He could go the distance. He started racing as a two-year-old and lost twice, once in 1947 and once in 1948. He ran and ran and ran.

  He missed his fourth year, usually a Thoroughbred’s best year, because of injury, then came back in 1950. I was five and a half going on six. I remember he had to carry heavier weights than other horses, who, of course, didn’t have his injury; though it had healed, it still affected him. He gave us thrilling races, even the ones he lost. What a courageous horse.

  Mom loved Seabiscuit, a grandson of Man o’ War, Man o’ War himself, Whirlaway and Count Fleet. I loved Citation. I wanted to be as courageous as he was.

  Young people search for heroes. The world is full of them but for whatever reason I found few historical figures that inspired me: Shakespeare, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Hannibal, Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth I. What united them was their courage under fire. Shakespeare’s courage wasn’t as obvious, but I knew enough about writing to see the chances he took, especially with material. If he tipped over the line, Elizabeth might have shut him down or, worse, shut him up.

  Movie stars left me cold—a bunch of people flouncing around with makeup on. The women especially seemed irrelevant. They were. The films of the fifties were like one long homoerotic song. The women were caricatures. I might not have put it in those terms at that time. My term was “yuk.”

  The films from the thirties and forties captured my attention. Those women seemed a little more real. We could watch these films early on Saturdays, when the Gateway Theater had a kids’ feature, an old movie and then the main feature for twenty-five cents. The junior-high set hung out there. Lots of the kids made out. The boys accompanying me found out I watched the movies and wanted to talk about them.

  But this left me with not much in the way of heroes. Citation it was.

  By now I have had ample opportunity to observe the courage of certain cats, dogs, horses and wildlife too. People think animals don’t know they can die. They know. I’ve seen them risk their lives for another animal, their babies or even a human. Love goes beyond species.

  The fall of 1959, I entered Fort Lauderdale High. Both excited and wary, I wondered how I would fit in. The lordly seniors appeared beyond reach. The juniors were a bit more approachable, and we lowly sophomores scurried about doing the upperclassmen’s bidding.

  Batista, brought down by Fidel Castro, changed our high school forever. The brightest and best of Cuba fled to south Florida. Cuba’s loss was America’s gain. In the span of a year, our high school welcomed many of these refugees, who were better-educated than we were, spoke better English than we did and nine times out of ten were better-looking.

  At that age your deepest desire is to belong to the “in group.” The Cuban kids, picked for the service clubs, landed in the center of everything.

  The service clubs were Anchor, Juniorettes and Sinawik for the girls; Key, Wheel and Civitan for the boys. One had to be tapped for membership. Few sophomores were tapped unless a big sister or brother happened to be in the club. Usually you cooled your heels until your junior year, hoping you’d make it.

  The tapping ceremony, noisy and fun, involved cars, decorated with streamers, greasepaint and funny horns, careening around the town, stopping at the homes of those who would be asked to join. Few kids left home that one Saturday out of each year.

  I did. I knew I didn’t have a prayer my sophomore year. I walked to the tennis courts.

  No small amount of snobbery went into those damn service clubs, which were, as the name implies, expected to provide service to the community outside the high school and were pretty effective in doing so. How many broken hearts and dashed dreams they left in their wake I don’t know. But they prepared us for life. You either make it or you don’t, and the real world judges you by the standards of the day, no matter how superficial.

  I didn’t expect much socially since we had little money and Fort Lauderdale High overflowed with wealthy kids, kids who drove to school in brand-new Corvettes, MGs, Austin Healys, Triumphs and Spyders. Convertibles were the thing. Of course, old cars reposed in the parking lot, too.

  I walked. It would be a cold day in hell before we had enough money to buy me a car. Even Mom didn’t have a car.

  Sometimes I’d catch rides with friends. The names of those people seem as familiar to me as the names of my closest friends today, and some of them still are my closest friends: Patrick Butterfield, Jerry Pfeiffer (deceased), Betty Pierce, Connie Coyne, Bill Wilson, Willis Fugate and Judy Bass. Other people like Judy Allen, Jeri Starr, Bonnie Baltier, John and Jeff Barker, Carlos Ullola, Armando Valdez (deceased), Noel Howlett, Tommy Van Allen, Hans Johnson, Sandy Annis and Larry Centers crowd into my mind because they were great fun and because they were kind to me.

  My life centered around my studies, tennis and the horses. Overnight the boys became bigger, stronger and obsessed with sex. Astonished by the change in them, I stayed friendly but not romantic. I remember the girls thought Bob McCarty sexy; his younger brother, David, also was very good-looking. Jerry Pfeiffer trailed girls behi
nd him even though he wasn’t good-looking then.

  Girls whom I thought I knew suddenly turned into simps in the face of these deeper-voiced buddies of mine. Jeri Starr was chased by boys from half the schools in Florida, although she never acted like a ninny.

  I liked the Sumwalt sisters, Nancy and Carol, because they acted the same when talking to boys as when talking to girls. It didn’t hurt their popularity. I used to giggle watching Noel Doepke restrain a budding Romeo with an icy smile. Nancy Meadows kept her cool. That was about it. The other girls went haywire. They were as bad as the boys, with the major exception that while the boys directly expressed their interest in sex, the girls were covert. The girls had more to lose. I knew this thanks to the endless lessons concerning Juliann Young.

  My sophomore year found me busy, loving Latin II and trying to steer clear of this romance stuff. My hormones hadn’t reached a fever pitch. At this point it was easy to sidestep the whole issue.

  Also, I am not a romantic person. If the world divides into romanticists and classicists, or Apollonian and Dionysian personalities, thank you Nietzsche, I’m a classicist, an Apollonian, a head-before-heart person.

  I feel and I feel deeply, but I rarely act spontaneously and didn’t even when I was a teenager. I think first, then act. Only animals cause this process in me to short-circuit, and sometimes I have to think first when it comes to them, too. I can’t feed every abandoned animal in the world although God knows I’m trying.

  Girls fell in love every other day. The boys, too. People sat in class and made eyes at one another. I couldn’t believe it.

  If I couldn’t believe it, it must have been a razor-blade ride for those boys maturing slowly. There we’d be sitting in a class with a kid who was physically mature, like Clark Blake, next to a boy whose voice hadn’t changed. The slow maturers caught rat week in gym class.

  There they’d be, exposed to the world in their gym shorts, skinny arms hanging out of a T-shirt, getting the stuffing knocked out of them by a bruiser like Ron Harnett.

  Emotionally we roughed one another up too, male and female. Sarcastic comments flew back and forth. If you lost your temper, you lost face. Ideally, you had to top the person attacking you. If you couldn’t, it was better to shut up. Thanks to Juts and Aunt Mimi, I excelled. After a time, people realized I could hurt them more than they could hurt me.

  More than one kid slunk out of the lunchroom in tears. High school, the great American leveling experience, unites each generation that experiences it: your first football game when your team loses, your first football game when your team wins, first love, first A, first D or F (some of us avoided this one), first inkling that this really was a rite of passage, first understanding of how people behave in groups and first taste of power or lack of it in a group.

  My generation, the biggest in America—and it will be as long as we are on the earth—was forced to be ruthlessly competitive. There were so many of us that school times were staggered to fit us in. We competed for grades, for places on sports teams, for one another’s attention and affection. Two thousand kids attended Fort Lauderdale High School. My class was over five hundred kids. Sink or swim. I swam for all I was worth.

  Unlike most of my peers, I had to excel. I was going to go to college and, I hoped, to graduate school as well. Determined to amount to something, I wouldn’t be sidetracked. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t fool around. Nobody was using drugs then.

  My friends had no idea how determined I was. On the surface I was fun-loving and the best female athlete in the school, better than most of the boys. Only the tanks among them could overpower me. I held my own with the rest and my arm grew stronger and stronger. It wasn’t just distance I was capable of, it was accuracy. In tennis I had fast hands and a bomber serve. I was too short to come down over the ball, so I had to rely on muscle.

  I confided in no one. That, for better or for worse, remains part of my character. I’ll happily tell you what I’m thinking. I won’t tell you what I’m feeling until I’ve known you for about five years and seldom then.

  The result of this was that I was reasonably popular, I got along, my teachers liked me and I liked most of them. I pulled a few pranks, the worst being when I dumped a dead fish into the ventilation system, which freed us from study hall and the tyranny of Miss Ida Mae Bryant, pound for pound as vicious as a piranha.

  If my sophomore year bolstered me, my junior year was sensational. I aced most of my classes. I was number one on the tennis team. A little girl called Chris Evert used to follow me around the Holiday Park courts because she liked my blue satin Flying L jacket. All those Evert kids were incredibly cute, combining the best of their mother and father. Since she was ten years younger I barely noticed her.

  My circle of friends grew. I was invited to the “good parties” although I often couldn’t attend because on weekends I worked mowing lawns. Jimmy Evert helped out Pat Butterfield and me by allowing us to roll the courts and sweep lines in exchange for our dues.

  The best thing about Jimmy was that he never let you know he was helping you. He had a gift for fixing a problem in your game. I learned a lot from that man and from Colette, too. Everyone loved them.

  Jerry, class of 1960, was now attending the University of Florida at Gainesville. He wrote me regularly. I felt grown-up to be receiving letters from a college man.

  I hot-walked ponies on Sundays during polo season. Mom flourished at the track that year, and I was becoming a regular on the shedrows. I had crossed the line between energetic girl and young woman. Men looked at me differently. Not once, not for a second, did I hear anything resembling dirty talk on the shedrow. The grooms and trainers respected women. Men acted with courtesy then. No one swore in the presence of a lady unless it was another lady—Mother, usually.

  What a golden year, from the fall of 1960 to the summer of 1961; to July 13, 1961, to be exact.

  34

  Continuity

  Neither of my parents could attend my tennis matches due to their jobs. I’d reached a level where I could compete in the city tournament in my age group and usually fight my way to the quarterfinals or semis. I still had received no lessons. I learned by watching others. Jerry and I played mixed doubles in the summers. We usually cleaned up.

  Thanks to Jimmy Evert’s fame and organizing ability, the best players would stop and visit if they happened to be in south Florida. Usually they’d hit with the kids. You don’t find generosity like that now—there’s not much glory in it.

  Mo Connolly, Alice Marble, Darlene Hard and Pauline Betz hit with us at various times. Mo Connolly was the only woman ever to win the Grand Slam titles in the same calendar year until Margaret Court astounded the world by doing it many years later. Short, powerful and capable of quick bursts of speed in any direction, Mo had a heart as big as her serve. Her early death to cancer was a loss not only to tennis but also to her community. She was a doer and a giver. Married to a man as kind and upbeat as she was, Mo had it all.

  Alice, when I met her, was already in her forties and good-looking in a glamorous way, although the alcohol was telling on her a little. Her ground strokes, classic, sent the ball back to you flat and hard. Just when you got used to the pace she’d change up. Mo, on the other hand, overpowered people. She hit rockets. I’ve been lucky enough to see many great women players since Mo, but I have never seen a woman consistently hit the ball as hard.

  I had managed to make it into the quarterfinals of the city tournament the first year I was eligible for the sixteen-and-unders, which was a tough division in Florida. I was playing kids who’d been taking lessons since they were six but I had something most of them didn’t—a wealth of athletic talent. I knew that if nothing else I’d outrun them, charge the net and pressure them every second. And I wouldn’t give up. Never.

  I’m not a chatty person but I was more silent than usual at home. The only time I get chatty is if I truly adore someone. Usually I’d talk a lot with Dad; I wasn’t even doing
that. Neither of my parents said anything.

  I’d played in the Orange Bowl tennis tournament in the fourteen-and-unders. I’d been stone quiet then, too.

  My quarterfinal match was to be played on a Friday. I faced a girl I liked very much. Martha attended Central Catholic High. Tall, composed and genuinely sweet, she had an advantage in her height, which gave her reach. If she came down over the ball and I couldn’t set up a lob far back enough, she’d grind me to dust.

  The day was hot. I noticed Denise Wall’s father (Denise was a shoo-in to win the sixteen-and-unders) sitting on the bleachers. A soggy cigar, part of Mr. Wall’s permanent ensemble, was your clue to his emotional state. If he kept biting it so that it would jump, you knew electricity was coursing through him. Jerry and a smattering of others were there. Chris was almost six; her sister, Jeannie, was about two years younger. Chris must have been on sister watch that day because she’d sit in the bleachers and when Jeannie, the little rowdy one, would take off, Chris would run after her. They were a comical pair. I don’t remember Drew Evert or Colette being there that day.

  Well, anyway, I won the first set, 9-7, I think. I lost the second, 4–6. I was being handed my ass in the third set. I was down 2–5 and it was my serve. I couldn’t find the court. At 0–4 I wanted to die. Then, I will never know why, my father squeezed into the bleachers, which had filled up. He smiled at me.

  I looked across the net at Martha and the one thought I remember having was, “I can’t lose in front of my father.”

  I fought my heart out. I ran down every point. I leaped, lunged and scrambled. I won the last set 7–5. Martha ran to the net, jumped over, shook my hand and then hugged me, her opponent. People in the stands applauded with enthusiasm. Mr. Wall’s cigar twirled like a dervish.

  Dad said, “I bet you need a Coke.”

  Amazed that I had lived through the match, I tottered to the Coke machine, the old kind where you had to walk the bottle through the maze and then pull it up straight. Jerry ran ahead of Dad and bought me a Coke.