What It Takes (30 page)

At the University of New Hampshire, in the new program for occupational therapy, she’d got engaged to a fellow named Joseph Bennett, who was badly infected with malaria from his days on Guadalcanal. That engagement lasted almost three years, but in the end, it fell apart. After college, in her resident training, she got involved with a young man who had osteomyelitis. That never got beyond a “serious friendship,” but her parents were horrified. “My God, Phyllis,” her mother scolded. “Why don’t you get away from these lame ducks!”

But she loved the work. It was a new field, exciting, and Phyllis felt like a pioneer. She worked in the psychiatric wards, teaching crafts, silver and leather. She was never scared of the men. She thought even a schizophrenic would maintain some respect for a woman. And the alcoholics would protect her, if need be. Meanwhile, she was helping, she was needed, she was good at her job. In ’48, she decided to follow her college friend, Elsie Deming, to Michigan, to the Army Medical Center, where the big job was being done. She and Elsie would join the Army, they’d see the world: Phyllis had never been west of New York State. Anyway, there was not, at the moment, a love in her life to keep her in New Hampshire. When Elsie met her at the station in Battle Creek, Phyllis laughed and said, “Tell you one thing: the next time I get engaged, I’m going to get
married
. Just give me time to get out the invitations ...”

She almost didn’t have time. Two days after she danced with Bob Dole, he called—nine-thirty at night!—and asked her out for a coffee. If it’d been anyone but that nice Lieutenant Dole, she wouldn’t have gone: he’d think she was sitting alone by the phone. But everybody knew Bob was a nice guy, always had a good word for everyone, had a job selling cars ... he didn’t try to flirt with the nurses, like some of the men. So, she said yes. And he told her about Russell, Kansas, and his father in the grain elevator, his brother and two sisters, and Dr. Kelikian in Chicago, and the operations. ... Then it was the Easter dance at the Officers’ Club, and more coffee dates, always at night. She had her work and he had his therapy, so it wasn’t like they spent every minute together. And Phyllis wasn’t looking for anyone special. ... But Bob was always fun, always so gracious, always opened the door of the Oldsmobile for her, always did the driving, always wanted to know about
her
, how
she
was doing. And he was brave about himself, and handsome, and smart. It was only a few weeks before she felt she wasn’t interested in a date with anyone else. Then Bob had to go to Chicago, to see Dr. K., and Phyllis went with him. Kelikian was urging Bob to go to school. He smiled at Phyllis, and said: “She can go with you and take notes.”

In April, Bob went back to Russell for a visit, and Bina got on the phone with her sister, right away. “I think Bob’s fallen madly in love with a therapist.”

“
Really
? How do you know?”

“That’s eighty percent of his conversation! What a difference!”

Bob was like a kid again. He’d get up in the morning, jump into his car, and drive right down Main Street. Visit with Doran and the farmers in the elevator. Stop in at Dawson’s, stay two hours! On and off the stools, over to the jukebox ... “Heyy, how ’bout some music? ...” Then back home, next door, to Kenny and Dottie. Told Dottie about the beautiful things Phyllis made with her hands. Phyllis can do this, Phyllis can do that. She’s got long dark hair, dark eyes, real pretty, real slender. ...

He told one friend: “Boy, she’s filled in all the right spaces!” Bina was teary with joy on the phone. “Lord, what a difference!”

A month after the dance, Phyllis got the test results for her Army enlistment. She had allergies the Army was concerned about. “Well,” Bob said, “you could prob’ly get out ... if you got married ...” Phyllis didn’t speak. Bob said: “Aghh, think you could live in Russell, Kansas?” She said she thought she could, with Bob.

She called her mother on April 27th, her birthday, and said she was getting married. “He’s been paralyzed, but he’s had a wonderful return. He’s still got some paralysis in his right arm, but it doesn’t seem to bother him ...” Her mother hit the roof.

“Phyllis, you
can’t
have another lame duck!”

“Oh, Mother!”

“My God, Phyllis!
You
said he can’t button a button, zip a zipper! How’s he ever going to earn a living?”

“He’s going to go to college!”

“Well,” Estelle Holden insisted, “your father and I think it’s just too soon.”

Within days, Estelle got a letter from Bob, analyzing his time in courtship with Phyllis. The way he figured, if it had been normal dating, say once or twice a week, it would have worked out to three years!

Estelle wrote back with her real reservations: “Phyllis is a very precious child to us, and we want the best for her. And unless you are capable of becoming a husband to her, in all ways, we don’t think it would be a good idea.”

That was hard for Bob to take. But Phyllis wouldn’t let him get down about it. “Bob, it’s just because they haven’t met you.”

She told her mother:
Make the announcement!
And she and Bob started driving east, to New Hampshire.

Two weeks later, Bina and Doran arrived, and Bob and Phyllis were married, June 12, 1948.

In June, after the College World Series and Graduation Day in New Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation gift from Pres), and started driving south. Bar and Georgie went up to Walker’s Point, to wait for Pop to find them a home. It was just a few days before they got the letter with the good news: Poppy was a star! Of course, all his Yale training was wrong, but he was getting better with a broom, and the boss said he was the best warehouse sweeper that Ideco’s Odessa Branch Office ever had.

And he’d found them a house—well, half a house. (He wrote that it was “kind of humble.”) So Bar and Georgie got an airplane to Dallas and then to the Midland-Odessa field, a propeller-flight journey of more than twelve hours, to join George in their strange new world ... and my, wasn’t it exotic!

First, it was flat, perfectly flat, like no land they’d ever seen. No brooks, streams, rivers. No native trees—no trees. It was bright, and hot like they’d never felt heat, and gritty everywhere with dust. The blacktop into town from the airport shimmered between opposing ranks of strange, hulking drill rigs, piles of steel pipe, casing, tubing, decking, cable ... all baked in the sun-grit, like ossified armies standing guard on the tatty tin or cinderblock sheds housing the businesses behind. And then, as George and Bar turned onto their street, East Seventh, the pavement gave way altogether, and they rolled on two ruts of dust to a stop, in front of their new home.

It was a shotgun house—tiny in the first place, but now partitioned down the middle, so two families could each have a narrow, half-living room, just inside the concrete front step, and then a counter giving on to a tiny kitchen, and one narrow bedroom in the rear. The partition ended at the back, with the bathroom, which both tenants shared. It was one of the few bathrooms on the street. Most had an outhouse in the boxy backyard, like Mr. Wagley, two doors down, whose outhouse shared his rear plot of dust with the junk he collected for a living, and his wagon, and his horse. The immediate neighbors, in the other half of the shotgun house, were a mother and her daughter (and the daughter’s toddler daughter), who made their living entertaining male guests, which pretty much tied up the bathroom, from sundown on.

It was all so ... interesting! You just didn’t
see
stuff like that in Rye, or Greenwich—even New Haven. In fact, back in Rye, Pauline Pierce thought poor Barbara must be desperate:
Odessa!
It smacked of Russia and want. She kept sending cold cream, and boxes of soap flakes, convinced that privation dogged her daughter at that edge of the earth. But there was no privation, no desperation. In fact, it was only thirty-five years later, when George Bush had to convince the world that he wasn’t some timid toy poodle, that it ever came to be described as a roll of the dice, a gamble. ... At the time, it was just
a wonderful adventure
! See, it
wasn’t
really their world. George and Bar always knew that—they weren’t trapped. They could always go back ... or go somewhere else. They were in it, and yet, not quite of it, immune to enjoy it like expatriates who talk with fascination about “the locals” and their strange folkways.

Such
fun:
high school football on Friday nights, with a crowd twice as big as Yale ever drew, all in their shirtsleeves, fanning themselves in the twilight heat, and girl cheerleaders! Never saw
that
back East! ... And barbecues over a fire in an oil drum, and grits, and chili, and chicken-fried steak at Agnes’ Café.
Oh, we love that stuff!
... And the strange and humorous things that George would report when he came home, about the squinty stares he drew at the oil field, or out painting pumps, with the good ol’ bubbas in the heat and the grit ...

Boy. Jus’ whu’the hayl’r yew dooin’ out ’ere ennuhways?

The short answer was: living high and free, on three hundred seventy-five dollars a month. And learning, sometimes the hard way. ... A couple days after they moved onto Seventh Street, Bar woke them all up in the middle of the night. Gas! She smelled it ...

Get out!

Get Georgie!

GET OUT!

DON’T LIGHT A MATCH!

Thing was, there were always a couple hundred wells flaring off within the city limits, a refinery, a few hundred tanks. ... Odessa, as the wakened neighbors pointed out, always kinda smelled like that ... ma’am.

It was land like Phyllis had never seen. No trees for miles, no hills or rocks like her home ground. But it was beautiful to her, at the end of that June. Phyllis was in love, and the harvest was on, the milo and beans were like rich green carpet, the ground checkered in emerald, gold, and deep brown, as Bob raced the Oldsmobile west on Highway 40, and told her about Russell. Bob said the earth there was
so flat
... on a good day, you could see Kansas City. Well, it wasn’t quite like that. Kansas City was two hundred miles away.

But she would have believed him, if he’d insisted. She was so willing to see it as his eyes did. If this was to be her adopted home, then she’d embrace it, too. But in Russell, it wasn’t quite that easy. For one thing, she came to make a home in a nest of ferocious homemakers. Actually, Phyllis knew how to cook—or thought she did: she’d even won a prize for a cake at the state fair in New Hampshire. But that wasn’t cooking in Russell, heck no. She couldn’t make the fried chicken like Bina (who could?), or the brownies, or the ice cream, or ... the problem was, Bina’s house was perfect, from the flowers bordering the lawn, to the shrubs and roses, the shiny scrubbed porch, and inside, the smell of flowers and wax, and the pie cooling on the dining room table, and not one dish out of place, unwashed, and the big embroidered white feedsack towels, the pink-and-green curtains on the French doors in the living room. It wasn’t that Bina was mean about it, no ... but you could see she noticed when something wasn’t just so, and Bob must have noticed, too. Of course, he didn’t say anything.

But Phyllis felt she had to be perfect for him—it was
expected
. She’d stand next to Bina for hours in the kitchen, watching and measuring what went into the bowl—Bina never had recipes. When Bob went to buy clothes, the tailor at Banker’s was going to take in the shoulder of the suit, but Phyllis figured out how to pad it underneath, just so, and it looked perfect. ... Then there was the matter of his neckties—she tied them. But she couldn’t get the Windsor knot, with the dimple just so, and the front just a hair longer than the back, like Bob liked it. And this went on for
years
, and she asked their men friends, and the salesmen at Banker’s to show her ... but it still wasn’t right. And, of course, she could see he noticed, they all did. ... They were always watching Bob, jumping up to help him, getting something for him, or fixing something near him that wasn’t quite right. ...

That was the heart of the problem, how they treated Bob, too tenderly, like a thousand-year-old vase. It just reinforced his feeling that something wasn’t right, wasn’t whole, about him. One day that summer, in lawn chairs out in Bina’s backyard, a glass of iced tea slipped from Bob’s numb left hand and spilled at his feet. “Oh, God,” Phyllis said, “can’t you hold on to
anything
?” Bina and Kenny looked at Phyllis like she’d just spat on the Bible. How could she talk to Bob that way?

But, of course, that was the right way. That’s one of the things Bob loved about Phyllis: she never treated him like a cripple, an invalid ... God, how he hated that word. ... She’d tell him flat out not to wait to be waited on: “Do it yourself... you can do it!” She’d get after
him
to work on his body. “You’ve got that leg exercise to do ... why don’t you get that out of the way?” And she was so matter-of-fact, so sure of him and what he could do. “Pick up your feet, Bob. There’s no reason to shuffle like that!” In time, Bina and the rest realized it was good for Bob. In Phyllis’s eyes, he saw himself whole. And why not? She never saw him any other way.

Around town, where the citizens looked at Bob like their own prize experiment (they were the ones who put him back on his feet!), there was a myth already spreading on Phyllis, that she was Bob’s therapist at the big Army hospital. Or, better yet, his nurse. She was the gal who nursed him back to life ... and fell in love. ... And no matter how many times Bob explained, or how many times Phyllis protested that Bob was well and strong again before she ever met him ... well, people believe what they want to believe. Even years later, when he’d risen so high, no one wanted to believe her when she said that he was always the strong one ... but she knew.

That September, they packed up the Oldsmobile again and started south, to Arizona, where Bob would go back to college, as a junior. The doctors recommended a hot-weather climate, after all the blood thinners Bob had taken. Of course, Bob drove all the way, and Bob found their two-room house ... and although Phyllis did take notes (and wrote test papers from his dictation), it was Bob who did the work, who studied all night, each night, by memory, pacing their living room, barking German verbs in his prairie voice, over and over, until he had them in his head, until Phyllis finally had to ask: Bob, why? ...