A Ticket to the Circus (8 page)

About halfway through the second drink, I began to get dizzy and sleepy, and I remember thinking how nice it would be to lie down, just for a minute, and take a little nap on the cool tile beside the pool. The next thing I remember is Larry carrying me into our house over his shoulder. He was so humiliated, and I can’t remember what he did or how he explained it, but I hope the one thing he didn’t say was the truth, “My wife has never tasted alcohol in her life, and she’s an idiot. Sorry.” I really, truly, hadn’t known there was alcohol in the drink. Isn’t that sad? At the wives’ teas, there was sometimes tart white wine, and I had a little, pretending to drink it but mostly just holding the glass. One of the ladies once put fresh cut peaches into the glasses, which made the wine sweeter and more palatable. I had done so many bad things, I was past the point of worrying about sin, and never even pretended to look for a church, as my father kept asking me to do, so what was the harm in having a glass of wine?

Larry had to get up at five in order to be at work by six, and I had nothing to do all day, so I slept late, had breakfast, cleaned the small house, and then either drove aimlessly around trying to get a handle on the area or walked the aisles of the PX or the mall and poked around in
stores. I had made no friends; it seemed hard to find any outside the social functions. And Larry was gone all day. At night he would come home, tired and down. We would eat dinner, watch TV for a short while, and go to bed, since he had to get up so early. He was having a hard time adjusting to the job, and occasionally he got migraines. I didn’t notice it as much before we got married, but at times he would seem blue for days or weeks on end, and then for no apparent reason he would snap out of it and be his old funny, chipper self again. Once, back when we were dating, we were watching
Green Acres
during one of these times, and he started laughing. Afterward he was cheery, like nothing harsher than rain had ever fallen on his head.

I’m sure his job made it worse. He had a lot of responsibility on his young shoulders as the leader of a platoon of soldiers and tanks, and he knew that he would be headed to Vietnam in a few months, where he would be responsible for the lives of his men. But while he was working things through, I was going quietly stir-crazy. We never went out to a movie or to eat. He was too tired to even talk much. We rarely had sex.

Then the phone rang one day and it was Edmond. We began to talk frequently, and the more detached Larry got, the more I began to miss home. I knew more clearly every day that I’d made a terrible mistake getting married. I began to think more and more about Edmond. He told me he was finishing up the centennial and would be going to Missouri next, and if I wanted to come back, I could go with him.

Obviously I couldn’t tell Larry the truth, so I just told him I wanted to go back home for a visit. He said fine, perhaps with relief, and I got on the bus. I didn’t know what would happen on the other end, but I couldn’t wait to get away from where I was, the small gray and chalk-white house with roaches, TV, and the boredom of the mall.

It was a bright, sunny day, I was full of nervous anticipation, I had a good book to read—Mary Stewart’s new book about Merlin,
The Crystal Cave—
and I felt like I’d been let out of a cage. Then somewhere between Clarksville, Tennessee, and Nashville the bus conked out. We sat on the side of the road for a couple of hours until somebody came and fixed it. I called Edmond and told him I was going to be late. He said not to worry, that he’d be at the Little Rock bus station, where we had arranged to meet. We made it to Memphis before the bus
broke down again. It was hot and muggy, it was late, and we were still more than three hours from Little Rock.

The Memphis bus station had to have been built off the blueprints for purgatory. The lights were dim fluorescent, making everyone look wan and sick. There were people who, I assumed, lived there—unwashed, with greasy hair, nasty clothes, and rusty ankles. Several slept soundly on the benches, not moving as my fellow passengers and I shuffled in. I was wearing a yellow voile dress that had wilted and glued itself to my sweaty skin hours before. My Arrid had given out some time ago, too, and I smelled like a skunk. It didn’t really matter, because everyone smelled like that, or worse. One of the drunk men kept coming over to talk to me with breath that would melt mascara, trying to get me to go out with him for a drink. I huddled on my bench, attempting to ignore him, and finally he went away.

I called Edmond again and told him it was going to be later. The clock ticked on and I had to call again. It was going to be later. And later. Until finally they said the bus was fixed and we would arrive at three in the morning.

Edmond was worn out with the waiting, but good-natured about it, and when we rolled in, he was there with his yellow glasses waiting for me. He gave me one of those great kisses, and we went to a little dump of a motel near the bus station. It was dark and I was exhausted from the trip. I don’t know how he stood the smell of me, but he didn’t want to wait for me to take a shower, so we went in, stripped down, and did the deed in the first five minutes we were inside the room. It was exactly like the first time. Maybe it was worse, because I was so tired and conscious of how sweaty and bad I smelled. I fell into the rough sheets, passed out, and the next morning we showered and tried again, but we both realized there was no magic there. We packed our bags, went out into the bright sunshine, and to my horror we were right across the street from the construction project my father was working on. He was running a crane, and I looked up and saw a tiny figure in the cab of the machine. I jumped into the car, terrified he had caught a glimpse of my bright red hair, and off we went.

Edmond tried hard to make a fun day out of it. We went to breakfast, and then he took me to the zoo, but the sad animals lying on concrete floors, panting in the heat behind bars, were so depressing. I
knew how they felt. We had lunch, and then I asked him to drop me off at the bus station. I called my mother and told her I was coming home and would tell her all about it when I got there. She was in total shock, so I didn’t linger on the phone. Edmond and I had a final (great) kiss, and I waved goodbye at the departing candy-apple-red VW bug—same year as my green one, which I had once seen as some kind of portent, now meaningless—trundling up the road toward Missouri. We had never once mentioned my going with him.

Of course, everyone in Atkins was stunned that I was back, but in spite of the circumstances, I knew more than ever that I didn’t want to be married. I called Larry and told him I wasn’t coming back. He got right into the car (I have no idea how he managed to get away from his duties so quickly) and drove straight to Atkins. Everyone said, “Give it a chance,” “You’ve only been married a few months,” “All newlyweds are like this in the beginning,” “He loves you so much, you love him so much,” and so on. But the main reason I decided to stay with him was because
he
convinced me that he loved me and wanted me back. He really did want to be married to me. He hadn’t been coerced into it.

So we went back to Fort Campbell, and things were a lot better. I guess my leaving snapped him out of his funk, and we began to go out, make friends, and have fun. A couple moved into the other side of our house and I had a girlfriend to hang out with. I was so grateful that I hadn’t ruined my life by running away with the wrong man, and grateful that no one ever knew about my near disaster. (Except now
everyone
knows.) I vowed to do better, to become a better wife and Christian. I rededicated my life to Jesus. (The great thing about Freewill Baptists is that you can sin and then rededicate and you are shiny clean and new, like a slightly used car that has been detailed.) I was determined to be the best wife ever. And for a while I was.

I
t was December and we were home. Larry was shipping out for Vietnam five days before Christmas, and we were trying to make it as festive as we could, splitting our time between my parents’ house and his parents’ house. He was one of nine children, and all of his siblings had come home to say goodbye to him. (His mother had had change of life babies, Larry and his twin sister, Linda, when she was forty-five, so Larry had nieces and nephews older than he was.) We had a big raucous dinner, and after we had cleaned up the kitchen and laughed and talked for a while longer, his older sister from Virginia and her husband went—without a by-your-leave—and got into our bed! It was the only spare bedroom, and we had been using it. I don’t remember why we just didn’t tell them it was our room, or go on down to my parents’ place, but it was late and we didn’t, so Larry’s mother gave us quilts to make a bed on the floor in the living room, with several kids scattered around on couches.

The floor was, well, a floor, and we had only a quilt or two between us and it. I was skinny, and my bones were digging hard into the linoleum. I could feel the bruises forming. I couldn’t find a place to even get comfortable, much less sleep. Then, for some insane reason, Larry decided to get amorous. I whispered, “No, the kids will hear,” but he had his mind made up, and I nearly strangled myself senseless keeping quiet, normally being somewhat of a screamer. I think that was the night I conceived our son, Matthew.

The night before Larry left, we booked a room in the fanciest hotel in Little Rock, splurging more than we could afford. (It could have been that night, too, that I conceived. It was just a day or two later. Or it might have been another day around that time. He was going to Vietnam, after all.) I took him to the airport the next day, then drove back home alone to cry, watch Walter Cronkite, and write letters every night. In January, I went back to Tech to finish my junior year.

In a couple of weeks, I began to feel odd things going on. My period didn’t come and my breasts were strangely tender. I waited it out
for another week or so, and when the period still hadn’t come, I went to the doctor. Yes, dear reader, I was pregnant. At the exact minute I walked in the door from the doctor’s office, the phone rang. It was Larry, calling from Saigon to tell me he was okay. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. I have a little news myself. You’re going to be a daddy!” There was a long silence, and then I heard a thud as he dropped the phone.

By good luck, my best friend Susan, who’d been my bridesmaid (and who looked good in blue), got pregnant two weeks after I did, and Aurora, my best friend at Tech, was already two months pregnant, so we all went through it together. (I gained the most weight.) I had a host of other friends from home and my art and English classes who were all there for me as well, not to mention the church.

My favorite class was creative writing with a teacher named B. C. Hall, or Clarence, as we called him. It was in his class that I learned to write. He sat cross-legged on the desk, as cool and hip as could be, hair just that little bit too long, giving us words of wisdom through clouds of cigarette smoke and squinted eyes, in a languorous drawl that held us spellbound. (Teachers were allowed to smoke in those days, I think. Or, more likely, he just said “screw the rules.”) On one of my stories, he wrote, “What’s an intelligent woman like you doing in a place like this?” I saved it and cherish it. We were friends until he died in 2005, and we wrote three screenplays together, two of which were optioned although not made. (Yet. I’m still an optimist.) It was in that class that I started writing stories that turned into my first novel,
Windchill Summer
, twenty-nine years later, a story about boys going to Vietnam and the toll it took on them and everyone close to them.

In class, I sat between a couple of hippie guys named Matthew and Larry, who were always under surveillance for being the typical long-haired peace-symbol-wearing dopers. Matthew had the longest hair of anybody at school, a droopy blond George Custer mustache, and little round John Lennon glasses. He walked with an odd bounce up onto his toes with every step, which reminded me of Bugs Bunny. Matthew and Larry of course smoked pot, which was still exotic to most of the kids, and owned a head shop called the Family Hand, which had a black light room with psychedelic posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and others on the walls. In the middle was a giant water
bed, where you could lie and float and pass some groovy hours. They felt sorry for me, since my husband was in the hated war, and adopted me and brought me milk to drink in class so I’d be healthy. If I had a couple of hours to kill, they insisted I go over to the shop and take a nap on the cool undulating water bed. I liked it so much I later got myself one.

I was hungry all the time and nervous with the strain of the war and the pregnancy. By the end, I had gained sixty-five pounds. Once when I was in a Taco Bell, a guy who had been in one of my classes the previous year came up and asked me if I had a sister. I said no, and he said, “Are you sure? This girl looks a lot like you, except she’s thin.” I wanted to smear his face with my enchilada. What a moron. But it sadly brought home the fact that I was fat. As school let out and the summer hit like an open oven door, I was huge and miserable. No air conditioners back then. At least not in our house. I was obsessed with the war, and I knew that every letter I got from Larry had been written two weeks earlier, or more, so I had no idea how he was doing or where he was. They weren’t allowed to say, exactly, but he named places such as the Pineapple Forest, Arizona Territory, and Da Nang. He was also near the Laotian border, and every night on the news when any of those places were mentioned, I squinted to see if he was one of the soldiers pictured.

I enrolled in summer classes in English, as I had every summer, to get a second teaching major. Then the fall semester started. I was the size of a blimp and totally miserable, waiting for my baby to arrive, sliding by my due date with no sign of labor. I had a night class in Asian art history with Mrs. Marshall, and one night I felt strange. This I announced to the class: “I feel strange.”

“Go HOME!” they all yelled at me, in unison, but even though I was two weeks past my due date, I just didn’t think it was labor. I didn’t have any pains. So I stayed until class was over, everyone watching me out of the corners of their eyes, and soon after I got home my water broke and my mother said I had to go to the hospital. I still wasn’t sure I was in labor, and when we walked through the door, I said to the nurse that I was sorry, I thought I might be in labor but wasn’t sure since I wasn’t in pain. I was afraid she would scold me and send me back home. She slapped me down on the table, laughed, assured me I
would have some pains, and then stuck me with a big needle full of painkillers. That’s what they did to ignorant twenty-two-year-old girls in 1971. They didn’t even ask me if I wanted to do a natural birth. Why would anybody want to do that? That’s why God invented morphine.