I Married a Stranger

College represented freedom. It was the first time in my life I didn't have to live with my parents. Mama hadn't settled down in the least although she was growing older. Living on campus at the University of Alabama gave me the first reprieve of my life and I knew from then on I had become a new person.

I had a few boyfriends, but none I was serious over. I really liked boys, but my attentions were placed more firmly in classes and dreaming of the future. There were memorable days at college, like the football games where Alabama (Roll Tide!) smashed the competition and were National Champions under the intimidating Bear Bryant. There were parties and more parties. Coming home to the dorm from a dance for the ROTC one night I saw a girl being escorted by her date and he wore his ROTC jacket, his nice white shirt, but his pants were missing and he stood in his shorts, kissing her good-night. 

There were trips to a limestone pit north of Tuscaloosa where a bunch of kids leaped off cliffs into deep blue waters. There were May days lying out with dozens of girls on the dorm's rooftop where we sunned ourselves, looking for a perfect tan. One day we heard a commotion and looking over the edge of the roof saw Joe Namath had returned to the campus for the day to visit his old Alma Mater. 

There was a little too much drinking now and then, interesting college courses that made high school look like kindergarten, and good friends made all around. I met an older student in his twenties from Cuba. He'd emigrated to the US on his own, and his father owned all the largest department stories in Cuba still. We discussed America and I was a fire-brand when explaining to him our democracy was much preferred to Cuba's dictatorship. He made me back up my opinions with facts and we spent two hours with me clarifying for him all the reasons my country and my government were the best in the world.

This man later followed me around after I left the University, followed me to New York where my parents lived, kept in touch by letter, and finally one day asked me to marry him. "You don't have to love me. You don't even have to sleep with me. It can be a marriage in name-only."

"Why would you want to do that?" I asked, mystified.

"Because you're the most intelligent woman I've ever met and I want you for my wife. I want to spend my life with you. I'd give you everything. I've already inherited many of my father's department stores. Eventually they'll all belong to me. You'll never want for anything--travel, clothes, money, jewels--whatever you want. All you have to do is marry me."

This saddened me completely. I would never marry someone for things, for financial reasons. Marriage was much too precious an estate for that.  "I can't do that. I don't love you and it wouldn't be fair. I can't marry someone for money."

"And I love you for that even more," he said, but his face was stricken and I knew he felt a loss so great I couldn't even fathom it. This was not like the rejections I'd given to other suitors. This was a serious man who saw himself lost in a great love affair.

  

Then my aunt died. My Aunt Marjorie lived in Galveston, Texas. I'd visited her a few times in her apartment there and she treated me with great care and understanding. Did I want a milkshake? Did I want to go down to the beach? She was a thin redhead, she liked to drink, and I just thought she was particularly bubbly and wonderful.

She'd died on the operating table during the fourth operation to repair her intestines—supposedly from her alcoholism. Her heart stopped and she just...went away.

I attended her funeral and while standing at the graveside I thought, Life is this short. She was just thirty-nine, still a pretty redheaded woman, and now she was gone, poof, it was over. I wondered why I was wasting my life at college. It was 1967, summer, school was almost out for the semester and I was about to finish my sophomore year. I knew the whole world was being shaken to bits by the Hippie Revolution. The center of it was in California—some fantastic land I longed to visit. I felt I was being left out of one of the most important events in history by not partaking in the revolution of these other young people. I should quit college! I should find a way to California! My favorite aunt was dead much too young. Life didn't wait around for us to finish everything we wanted to do and the “revolution” wasn't going to last forever. If I wanted to see and experience the world I had to get a move on. Writers needed to experience living above all, that's what I believed. I could study on my own, and as it turned out that's the best thing college taught me--how to study and to learn and to remain curious.

I talked to the Dean of Social Work, my part-time employer at that time. “I need to go,” I said. “I'm missing out on everything.”

“I quit college after my second year too. I went to work in the coal mines in Virginia. But I came back. Not many come back, you have to know that, Billie Sue, and you're such a bright student. I'd hate for you to drop out and never return. Odds are, though, you won't.”

“I know. But I just have to go. I have to see things. I want to live. I don't feel like a student anymore.”

The office workers and the Dean gave me a solid gold charm engraved with their thanks from the department and wished me good luck, good luck, please come back...

First I had to get some money together. No one was going to pay my way to California and I certainly wasn't going to hitchhike. A boyfriend discovered I was with an aunt in Atlanta looking for a job. He came to pick me up and drive me to Louisville, Kentucky where not only could I find a job, but we could date.

I worked first at the big department store downtown, a clerk at the candy counter. I found a cheap room with a bath and tiny studio-sized kitchenette in a run-down hotel. It was all I could afford. The linoleum was peeling off the floors, the sofa opened out for the bed, and outside the window, only feet away, were the barred windows of a juvenile delinquent center.

Across the street from this palace was the general hospital. I went looking for a better job there. I was told I had no experience, so... I came back. I came back and didn't stop coming back to apply and force them to let me have a job. I said, “I live right across the street, I can be here anytime you want!”

Finally I was hired to train in the admitting department. A real paycheck finally so I could save for a trip West.

I spent a year in Louisville, working, dating, and saving. On my birthday when I turned twenty-one I had my stash and was ready to head for California. I called my mother to tell her. What could she do now? I was of age and no one could tell me anything or stop me from what I wanted to do. She said, "Don't go." I said, "I will."

I took a bus to California and tasted my first Hippie experience in San Francisco. I stayed a week, wandering the famous Haight-Ashbury district, hanging out in free “pads” of hippies I'd just met, taking flowers from kids on the streets, and wallowing in the movement that defined my generation. It was like an unending party, but beneath the long hair, the beads, the bell-bottoms, and the pot smoke, these people really believed in what they were doing. They wanted things to change and they were dead serious about it. They wanted the war in Vietnam to end. They wanted the Establishment to admit life wasn't all about a corporate job, a paycheck, and a fancy car. I loved them, all of them, but I wasn't really a Hippie myself. I was an observer. I was mentally taking notes as a writer.

I left San Francisco for Los Angeles and ended up in an apartment with my first cousin who lived in Long Beach. After arriving there life speeded up as if someone had pulled a lever. One day the young man, Ron, who lived across the hall, knocked on my door and said, “Come to the party upstairs, everyone's there.”

I had a book in my hand and had been immersed in reading a novel. I was shy, awkward, and not very social. I said, “No, that's okay, I'm reading.”

Suddenly Ron swooped me into his arms, took the book out of my hands and put it on a table. He started down the hall carrying me in protest to the stairs. “Put me down!”

“No, you're going to a party. There's someone I want you to meet.”

Once upstairs at the apartment filled with tenants drinking and laughing, Ron deposited me on the floor next to a young Navy man who introduced himself as Lyle Mosiman. We talked and laughed. I thought he was handsome. He thought I was beautiful. We probably fell in love on that first meeting. I know we were really attracted to one another.

During the next two weeks Lyle and I went with other friends to “The Pike,” a beach side amusement park, to a Fourth of July picnic on the beach, and before we knew it he was telling me I was going to marry him.

I sat on my sofa reading. He had brought over a photo album. He opened it and began telling me this would be my father-in-law, this my mother-in-law, and his brothers and sister my other in-laws. He was from Michigan and he showed me photos of where his parents lived. I laughed at him, thinking him ridiculous. “I'm not getting married to you. I hardly know you. This is the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“That doesn't matter because I'm telling you right now, you're going to marry me.”

Within a week I received a phone call from Mama telling me my brother, Brent, had been in a terrible car accident and I needed to come home. She meant come home to New York where they still lived. I promised I would.  I'd catch the very next flight.  I got off the phone and explained to Lyle how I had to return east.

“You can't do that! You'll never come back!”

I had heard this before, from the Dean of Social Work, and he'd been right too.

I walked with Lyle down to the beach. It was dark, the waves coming onshore silver with grunion, their scales flickering in the moonlight. We climbed into the lifeguard's chair and I sat in Lyle's lap, laying my head on his shoulder. He was so strong, so wonderful, but I had to see about my brother, didn't I?

Lyle said, “Marry me. If you don't agree to marry me, you'll never come back and I'll never see you again. I can't live without you.”

It only took about five seconds. I'd been proposed to before, four times in fact, and never even gave the proposals a moment's real thought. This time thought was five seconds long. I suddenly realized I was in love with this big, handsome hunk of soldier and despite all my good intentions to keep myself footloose and free, I was going to say yes.

“Yes,” I said. “I'll marry you.”

He almost leaped from the high seat and dumped us onto the beach. He held me very tight and close and we watched the silver waves in the moonlight knowing we'd just made the most important decision ever. We were pledging our lives to one another. 

I didn't even know how it happened. I'd only known him two weeks. I knew little about him. He hadn't gone to college, he wasn't an officer in the Navy, his prospects were probably small and dim. But the heart can't think, it has no brain, it operates on emotion, pure real emotion, and my heart told me this was right, this was good, I loved the man. We would be married.

* * *

The next day Lyle showed up at my door with wedding rings. He solemnly put the engagement ring on my finger and kept the wedding ring in the box. We talked about marrying after I returned from New York.

I flew home and Daddy met me at the airport. As he was carrying my bag I held out my left hand and showed him the ring.

His eyebrow lifted. “What's that? You're engaged? Your mother's going to be surprised.”

I told him about Lyle and how we were very much in love, it was going to be splendid.

Once home I discovered my brother wasn't in a hospital. In fact he just had a broken nose and a bruised ego about wrecking his car. Mama had made it sound like he was dying and I had to hurry home. What a joke. Yet it was her lie that threw me into the arms of the man I'd marry so I guess I can thank her for that.

At home Mama had a conniption as I expected she would. “You can't get married! You don't know him! Are you pregnant?”

Of course she would think that. “No, I'm not pregnant. I'm in love.”

When I insisted I was going to do it no matter what she said, she turned to Daddy and said, “Then we have to buy her a wedding gown and invite Mama from Alabama, and arrange for a church and a reception.”

I groaned inside. I hadn't wanted a big wedding. I just wanted to get married and get on with my life without all the fuss. But Mama would have her way.

Two weeks later Lyle showed up from California. Daddy rented him a tux. My grandmother and aunt came all the way from Alabama. My brother was the best man. We both had to have a counseling session with the Congregationalist preacher who was to marry us. He said to me, “You don't know this boy, not really. Why are you doing this? You don't know if he has insanity in his genetic background, you don't know if he wants children, you don't know anything about him.”

Oh, I could tell this man about insanity in one's background, but Mama was sitting right there so I said nothing.

“I'm marrying him because I love him and I want to be his wife.”

No one was going to talk me out of it. 

“Well, I'm against it, but I'll do a special service for your wedding and add in that if either of you have kept any serious secrets from one another, you can get an annulment.”

I wore a thousand-dollar, long satin wedding dress studded with tiny pearls. The satin train was yards long. Mama hired a photographer, but he had a hard time getting me to smile, I was so nervous. I drank a glass of buttermilk, but my stomach was still upset. 

Daddy drove me to the church and on the way I looked out at the flowered fields. It was July 28, 1968. I was twenty-one years old and so was Lyle. It was true I didn't know him well. Altogether we'd known one another four weeks. Two in California. Two apart with me in New York, my mother making wedding plans. This whole thing was...crazy. And I never did such crazy things.

“Daddy, I don't think I can go through with this!” My nerves had me jangled and tangled. I was ready to get out of the car and flee across the fields and disappear.

“Oh, that's just wedding nerves. Everyone gets them. You'll be all right. He's waiting for you at the church. We have to go.”

I calmed. I thought about Lyle, his aqua-blue eyes, his wide shoulders and beautifully muscled body. I thought of his humor and his wit. I thought of how he looked at me as if no one else existed in the world. And I stayed in the car until we reached the church.

After the ceremony, we had a small reception at a local restaurant. There was pink champagne and fine food. My Bigmama was there, my Aunt Dean and her son, Robert. It was small and beautiful and memorable. 

That afternoon I returned to Mama's house to change into a suit for traveling and Lyle and I drove to Lake George, New York for a one-night honeymoon in a lovely motel near the lake.

At dinner that night he flirted with the waitress and I thought, “Oh no, we're just married and he's flirting!” But I came to know after some time Lyle was a man who appreciated all women and if he could get one to smile, he was going to do it, but his love? His love was all mine. It still is.

This year in 2013, we will celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary. 

We're still deeply in love. 

I made the right decision. Maybe I was lucky, maybe it was a chance meeting that was meant to be, and, after all, it was Fate. It really doesn't matter why I met and married a man after only knowing him two weeks. What matters is spending a long life together in fidelity and love and friendship. In the end, that's all that ever matters.

College Days and the Professor From Hell

Sometime between my sixteenth and seventeenth years my Dad was transferred with his oil company to New York State. They moved to a little town in the Catskills and lived in a trailer in a trailer park near a mountain. Later on they moved to Athens and bought a lovely, two-story house on a hill overlooking the Hudson River.
 
During my senior year in high school they were in the trailer and it was too close, much too close. I could hardly stand to be inside with them and their quarrels. I dated, I swam at the pool, I rode my bike. When school started I was enrolled for my senior year at the local high school. It didn't work out well. I wasn’t accepted there. My southern accent was made fun of, even by teachers. (Teacher: “Billie Sue, say the word p-e-c-a-n for us.” I said, “PaKahn.” They all laughed. Teacher: “No, it's 'pee-can.'”) Kids played pranks on me. During lunch break while I sat in the auditorium they sent a black boy to sit beside me to start up a conversation as if just because I was Southern, I was racist, and they wanted to see what I'd do. The boy and I had a little talk and he left. Other kids who had put him up to it were mystified. Surely, they thought, I would have gotten up and flounced away from a black boy!

I begged to go back to Alabama. “I want to go to college there, and if I stay here, I’ll have to pay out of state tuition,” I explained.

My parents relented and let me go. I finished the twelfth grade in Evergreen, Alabama high school and applied for both the University of Alabama and Auburn. The day I got the letter accepting me into the University, I sat on Bigmama’s little back porch steps and looked out at the woods. Now my life would change. I was going to get out of my family’s grasp completely. I applied and got a grant for college. I worked little jobs while at the school, and during a couple of summers I went back to New York to work and save money to pay for what the grant didn’t cover—my cafeteria tickets paying my food five days a week, and my books. I worked at a mushroom plant, I worked in a freeway gift shop, and I worked as a waitress. I put all my earnings in a big jar and at summer's end that's what I took with me to pay for my food at college.

The summers were just as terrible as my childhood days had been with my parents. They were still in the trailer and the walls were paper thin. I stayed in my room when home, playing 78 rpm records of Bob Dylan and Otis Redding to make a wall of noise of my own. I dated a nice boy who fell in love with me and wanted to get married and I told him no, marriage wasn't in my plans, and besides I didn't love him. An old boyfriend from Alabama had joined the Air Force and he came to visit me in New York. He, too, proposed, reminding me I wanted to travel and with him in the service, I'd get to live that dream. I thanked him and said no, marriage wasn't in my plans.

#

The university was the biggest change yet for me. Bigdaddy had not only been the single person present when I graduated high school on a rainy May night when I was seventeen, but he was also the one who drove me a hundred miles distant to take my SATs. I didn’t know until I came out of the building hours later that he had sat in his old pickup truck all day, his hat over his face, resting and waiting for his “Sugar Baby.” How I loved him! Hours and hours in the heat of the truck, waiting patiently until I was done. This grandfather was dedicated to his granddaughter and wanted only the best future for her. It made my heart swell with gratitude and love for him.

The girls’ dorm was overfull so three of us had to share one room for a while until we could get our single or double rooms with a roommate. I was housed with two girls who were friends from the same town. They had matching bedspreads, lamps, and housecoats. I had a quilt for my bed, no lamp, no stereo, and no housecoat. When I went down the hall to the shower I had to walk there dressed in my slip. For some reason this shamed me.

I wrote to Bigmama how unhappy I was, how badly I felt. I was still wearing clothes that my mother had made or bought for me when I was fifteen. These girls had everything, they were snobs, and they wouldn’t talk to me. The worst thing of all—I didn’t even have a housecoat.

A week later there was a notice in my post office box that I was to pick up a package. I opened it in the dorm. Bigmama had bought me a lovely new housecoat. It was prettier than either of the girls’ housecoats I shared my room with. That’s how she was, my grandmother. She wouldn't let me be unhappy if she could help it.

I had boyfriends and attended fraternity parties. One boyfriend was Jewish and his fraternity on campus decided I was their little queen, though I was not Jewish. They lifted and installed me on top of their big refrigerator, hailing me as the one girl they adored the most.

My hair was long, almost to my waist. I started looking like a preppy, donning the leather penny loafers and pleated skirts and sweaters other girls wore. I had to spend my ten dollar a week allowance Daddy mailed me for weekend food paying on my clothes credit account, but I looked like everyone else finally. In order to eat on weekends I got myself invited to pizza parties the other girls threw in the dorm or I ate snacks from a box kept beneath my best friend's bed. At the time it felt more important to dress well than to eat.

I partied on the weekends, and studied hard during the week. I found a friend, a Lebanese girl others thought must be black because she was so dark. I told her this was 1966 and if they wanted to act like ignorant bigots that was their problem. When we sat down at a cafeteria table with some girls, they would take up their trays and move. “Don’t worry about them, Zeba,” I said. “They’re about as stupid as they come. They’ll flunk out this semester, you watch.”

Her name was Diane Saliba, her father owned a furniture store in Dothan, Alabama. I called her Zeba. When she found I was spending my weekend food money for clothes, she showed me the stash under her bed. She kept everything in there—tuna, bread, soups, crackers, cookies, fruit. “You won’t go hungry,” she said.

Once there were some boys from another college visiting the University over the weekend and they were calling up random girls for blind dates. I got a call and said, yes, I’d go, did he have a friend for my friend, Diane? “Sure,” he said. “We’ll be there at seven.”

A call came to our room that the boys were in the lobby waiting for us. Diane had dressed pretty, but she was nervous. She wasn’t having good luck with boys on campus. It was that prejudice thing. It was this ugly thing so prevalent in our country.

We went down and there were four boys in the reception area. They all stood. They looked at us and we introduced ourselves. The boys looked at one another and I got a bad feeling. Finally, one boy said, “Well, Diane’s date couldn’t make it. He had to leave.”

Zeba’s face blanched. She knew what was going on, we both did. Her blind date was right there, but he didn’t want to go out with her. I said, “I’m not going either. I have to wash my hair. Goodnight.”

Zeba and I climbed back upstairs to our rooms and at that point she was weeping. “He was there, I know he was!”

“Ssshh,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulder. “Who cares anyway? They don’t even go to this school, who do they think they are? They're stupid and I didn't want to waste my time on them.”

#

I got a job with the Dean of Social Studies to help pay my expenses. On days when I had just a class or two, I went over to the office and did research. They secured me a pass for the library stacks to find books they needed for the research. I thought I’d died and gone to hog heaven. The stacks were a holy place. Undergraduates like me weren’t allowed there. My special pass let me in and I spent hours combing through ancient and valuable books. I would hurry to find the book or two the Dean wanted, then I’d linger, looking at books of poetry, falling in love with the smell of books, the leather bindings, the engravings in older books. I was a miner in the vaults of the book world. I lost myself in them, dreaming of the day I would write a book and see it on the shelf of a library. These were my heroes. The great writers, the authors of books that lasted, the men and women who had made a difference with their words.

My major was English, but my classes were boring. I loved my psychology classes, my art classes, and I didn’t even mind biology or history, but what I wanted to love most, I liked the least. In one English course we were being asked to read famous short stories and then write papers about the stories. Why hash over what’s already been written, I wondered? My grades began to slip along with my interest. I much enjoyed reading the stories. I just didn’t see how our critical papers regurgitating them was worthwhile.

One day the professor called me into his office after class. He was probably in his forties. “You’re doing poorly in my class. Could you tell me why when you scored so high on your entrance exams in English and it’s your major, why you're doing barely passing work?”

I was eighteen, a freshman. No one warned me early courses might be a little boring and later on I’d get into more interesting course work. I thought this professor honestly wanted to know what my problem was. I was young, naive. I said, “I just find it boring.” The minute it popped out of my mouth, I knew it was a mistake being so honest. His eyebrows raised, his brow furrowed, his lips turned down.

“Boring!”

“I don’t mean you, I mean what we’re doing in your class. I like reading the stories, but I don’t see the point in writing papers telling you what the stories were about. It’s like I’m back in high school or something.”

He cocked his head and said, “So what would you rather be doing instead?”

“I’d rather write my own stories.”

This admission set him off, but good. I’d already insulted his course and now he was having a personal reaction. “What are you, eighteen? You haven’t lived long enough to write anything worth reading. What do you think you could write?”

“Well, maybe not now, but I think I can start writing fiction soon.”

“Tell me, Miss Stahl, what do you want to do when you finish college?”

“I want to be a writer. I want to write novels.”

He raised his hands in the air in exasperation. It was as if he couldn't believe his ears and he got very agitated. “Do you know how many hundreds of students I’ve had come through this office who want to write the Great American Novel? None of them will try it and those who try won’t make it. What makes you think you can when others can’t?”

I was speechless. “Well, I know I have a lot to learn…”

“Right! And passing my course is one of those things you’ve got to do first. If you don’t understand these stories I give you to read, how are you hoping to write one?”

“But I do understand the stories. I’ve already read many of them before I came to the University.”

“You don’t know anything. You’re a little freshman with wild dreams. You'll never write a novel or be published. You're just a kid going nowhere. Now get out of my office and do your work or I won’t pass you!”

I hurried out on the brink of tears. No one had ever told me I couldn’t be whatever I wanted to be. No one had tried to derail my dream. I got to my dorm room and threw myself on the bed and cried hard. His words kept repeating themselves in my brain. “Hundreds have come though this office who wanted to write the Great American Novel.”

Suddenly I got angry. How dare he tell me I couldn’t do something. How dare this man who was just a teacher, serve pronouncement on my future and my career. I’d show him.

I sat up and wiped my face. I straightened my shoulders. I’d pass his class all right. I’d put up with his stupid assignments and one day, one day I would publish novels and to hell with him.

I didn’t know it then, but many a failed novelist teaches at universities. It must hurt them to see young students come along with big ideas of being a published author. They know with a certainty some of them will do it.

I did it.

Years later, after several published novels and stories, I wrote to the University of Alabama newsletter detailing my experience with that professor. I warned against the teachers of literature who hoped to kill off the dreams of their young students. It was a crime to do it, but I was proof that some students who go through their hallowed halls end up doing exactly as they said they would no matter what discouragement is met and overcome. I advised creative students they must stick to their hearts' desires and never let anyone dissuade them.

What I understand now is if you can be dissuaded, you aren't meant to be a writer anyway. If some arrogant prick of a professor tries to derail you, if he makes fun of you, and you give up, you had nothing strong enough to hold you in place. If friends or family try to stop you and succeed, you were going to be stopped anyway, by something. If rejection buries arrows in your heart until your heart's blood is empty, then your sensitivity to setback and rejection will end the process.

I knew I'd never stop. No one could make me. No one could get in my way. If I wanted this thing, I only had to work at it and keep going. Giving up wasn't a phrase I understood. My stubborn nature was stronger than anything obstructing my path.

It takes much more to be a published writer than stubbornness. In my case, being stubborn sent me onward to where I could train myself for my chosen profession. It's held me in good stead over the years, too. If there's one thing my mother gave me, maybe that's it—getting what I want. Maybe in some way we're all put into the families we need most so we become the person we're supposed to be. All I know is I developed a spine. I stood up straight and I moved forward. It would prove this attitude was necessary as I had a long way to go before publication and a lot more headache to go through than just some ridiculous professor's contempt.

Attempted Suicides and Dreams of Escape

Thirteen is not a good year in the normal human lifespan.  Anytime you meet a thirteen-year-old girl turn and run if you can.  Slights are catastrophic, longings are stronger than they ever will be again, and immense love is needed to waft the girl-child into womanhood. 

     It’s the year you decide if you’re pretty or you’re not, a hard undertaking if there ever was one.  It’s when you begin thinking about boys’ hands on your body and their lips on your lips.  You’re between the know-nothingness of childhood and the all-knowingness of adulthood.  Stuck that way, you sometimes act like a kid and sometimes as wise as any grownup.  Your thinking is muddled, your hormones are raging, and the future looks so far away you can’t believe you’ll ever get there.

     It was no different for me.  I alternately hated and loved my parents.  I thought of running away and immediately discarded the idea as impossible.  I began to pray in earnest for a life of stability and normality. 

     I always had nice clothes, new ones the beginning of every school year.  I always had plenty of food to eat and a decent home to live in.  If I wanted something new, like a transistor radio when they first came out, I got it.  But I was as poor in love as the worst pauper on earth. 

     Add feeling unloved to a thirteen-year-old’s shoulders and it is nearly hopeless to get through each day.

     It may be a small miracle I survived without taking missteps into clinical conditions like depression or moving toward a life of addictions.  It is a greater miracle that I survived almost intact enough to finish high school, get into a good university, and become a writer.

     A lot of people think writers all have battered, unjust, abusive childhoods.  That’s just not true.  It happened to be true for me, but an unhappy childhood is not de rigeur for a writing life.  It could be true that a happy childhood is the unusual, not the unhappy one. 

     I don’t claim my childhood was any worse than many children live through.  It doesn’t make me better or kinder or more understanding to have experienced it.  It did, however, cause me to be mature in mind and sober as a judge.

     I began to hear the unsaid words when people talked, to note the undercurrent beneath people’s emotions, and the reasons behind their actions.  I became a student of the hidden and unvoiced.  This was good training for a novelist.  Unless you understand the real character of your fictional creation, how can you expect to make him live?  And without knowing every single emotion a person might have, fictional people aren’t people at all, just stick figures on a false stage.

     I grew even more withdrawn while staying close and involved and listening.  Getting too close to Mama would only hurt me, so I kept away.  Buying into her pipe-dreams or moods or opinions never tempted me.  She wasn’t right, that’s all I knew, and if I wanted to grow up to be all right myself, I’d have to keep my real person tight and secret from her. 

     There is a mask you put on to make sure people can’t get through.  If they scream, the mask slips into place and you don’t bat an eyelash.  If they take a belt to whip your legs, you stand back and let them, while turning a scornful eye.  If they neglect and ignore you all the better, because you have the time then to consider the world you find yourself in.  If they go on sprees or start big physical fights, you mask up, hop the pony to ride off into the sunset, and tell yourself how crazy it all is, but it’s not going to touch you.  It’s not going to infect you.  It’s a sickness and it might be catching, so don’t get too close, for god’s sake.  If you make a mistake and go too far in that direction, you end up so disconnected, you can never plug back into the world.  It’s all a balancing act, which adds to the stress. I’m sure a shrink would have a field day with these kinds of confessions, but we don’t really need them to understand how a young girl finds ways to keep herself whole.

     Endure what you have to, that became my only philosophy.  The alternative was taking myself out of the picture permanently, and I was never tempted to do that.  Enduring became a badge of honor.  If I could get through it, I’d know something, no matter how trivial, once I got to the other side of it. It was all experience. I soaked it in. I kept it. I turned it this way and that and gleaned meaning from it.

     As you can see, my mother really was mentally ill.  We don’t hold the mentally ill responsible, but you can’t help it when you’re young and helpless, and in the clutches of the mentally ill parent.  You think then that they can help it, because you don’t know better.  You believe they act with personal willpower so they could choose not to do it.  You think if anyone ever saw it, they’d throw away the key the next time she was locked up, and wouldn’t that be restful for the rest of us?   

     I was heading fast into bitter cynicism.  Into fatalism.  I had just hit my teens and the woman was driving us all about as crazy as she was.  If I didn’t get away from her soon the mask I used and the distance and the uncaring attitude would crack like dried mud and fall off, leaving me bare-faced and vulnerable. 

     But getting away wouldn’t come for a while.  For another two years or so I was trapped.  I couldn’t get home to Alabama no matter what.  I wrote Bigmama letters once a week, telling her how bad things were, and how I wanted to come back.  It must have been hard for her getting those letters.  She might have written or called her daughter to suggest she send me back and was rebuffed.  There wasn’t anything she could do but wait.  We both waited it out like you wait out a storm.  It had to blow over sooner or later.  Storms aren’t infinite conditions without change.

Around fourteen we left Helena, Arkansas and lived on a lake called Moon Lake in Mississippi. Daddy worked in Clarksdale across the river. Our house had stilts on the back that kept the lake from overflowing into the house. The front was a café. This was one of many little business operations Daddy took part in, probably because he’d been talked into it by my mother. We lived in the back. My room had windows all the way across it facing the lake.

Mama took to some heavy duty drinking there since the café had a beer license and drink was so handy.  My best friend that year was the black woman who cooked for the café. She lived down the road and when I was lonely, as invariably I was, I would walk to her house and sit in her little house trying to turn her into my grandmother. She was my grandmother substitute and she was kind to me, recognizing a lonely girl who needed a little kindness.

Moon Lake was the place I watched my Mama try to cut her wrists. It was one of those very bad days for her—a suicidal day. She had locked herself in the bathroom, ranting and raving, but I don’t remember about what. I feared for her. Daddy hadn’t gotten home from work yet. Our café cook, the kind lady I visited, had left for the day. The café was closed. Brent was outside playing and I was happy for that. It was just my mother and I locked in this horrid drama that could mean the end of her.

I peeked through the keyhole. Mama sat on the toilet with one wrist in her lap, her palm up. In her other hand she had a double-bladed razor blade. She just sat there looking so sad, like the saddest person in the whole world, staring at her vulnerable wrist. I began to cry and beg, as I had done the night when she locked herself away on Christmas Eve. “Mama, don’t do that,” I called to her through the door. “Mama, please don’t.”

I didn’t know what to do or where to go for help. The café was on a gravel road along the lake, the nearest neighbor miles away. I knew I could use the telephone and call the police, but Mama would kill me for that. She’d never forgive me.

I sat outside the bathroom door, eye pressed to the keyhole, praying she wouldn’t kill herself, begging her to listen to me. She didn’t. She ignored me because she was lost in her own dark world and she was trying to decide to leave it.

My vivid imagination during times like these was a horror to me. I imagined her hand holding the razor blade moving over to her wrist. I imagined the slicing, the unfolding of flesh, the welling of red blood. I imagined her sitting on the toilet seat while her blood pooled down her legs to puddle the floor, her slumping, her body lying on the cold tile floor, her eyes closing and me losing her, forever. I loved her truly. I loved her until my heart was bursting and I didn't want her to die. 

I don’t know how long this went on. It felt like forever. Daddy finally arrived home from Clarksdale and I told him what was going on. My face was red and wet with tears. My heart was breaking. If only she wouldn’t do these things! Of course she didn’t do them to personally hurt me or anyone else. She did them because she couldn’t help herself, because she was sick in heart and mind and life looked too dreary to live.

I went outside and down to the lake to sit by the shore. There really was nothing I could do about what was going on inside. Daddy would talk her out of it, he would save her…or he wouldn’t. I couldn’t change anything, I couldn’t make life right for her, and I couldn’t watch her kill herself. I had kept watch until Daddy got there and that was all I could do for her.

#

Around that time I began to have a mantra, a prayer that I thought every single day. It went something like this: Help me survive this. Keep her alive, keep us all alive. Get me back home to Alabama. Please.

From fifteen until sixteen I was in Alabama. Just before my sixteenth birthday I came down with infectious hepatitis. I’d contracted it from contaminated meat at school. A little three-year-old boy died from infectious hepatitis in Paul, the tiny village just blocks from my grandparents’ home.

I was at school and my boyfriend reached out to tap me in the solar plexus while we were all jostling around in the hallway between classes. I doubled over in pain. At home that afternoon I told Bigmama. “He didn’t hit me hard or anything. He just tapped me, playing around, and it’s sore here,” I said, rubbing my upper belly.

“We’re taking you to the doctor,” she said, recognizing this symptom wasn’t anything to dismiss.

We walked into the doctor’s office and he stood from his desk to point at me. “She’s got hepatitis. Look at her eyes, the whites are all yellow.”

I was put to bed in the second bedroom of Bigmama’s house and she had to wait on me. The doctor told her my liver was so soft and floppy that if I were to get up and move around much, it might just flop over inside and kill me. I was to have no grease, so everything had to be baked. “Feed her liver that you bake in the oven, and give her milkshakes. Keep her in bed at least six weeks, flat on her back. I can’t stress this enough, Naomi. Keep her in bed on her back.”

I returned to my two loves during that prolonged illness—reading and the radio. Bigmama put a radio in my room and brought me books. My friends tried to come to see me, but it was contagious so they had to stand outside the doorway to speak to me. After a while they stopped coming.

I missed the last month of school and once well, was promised I could take the semester tests and pass into the eleventh grade.

On my sixteenth birthday, early that morning, Mama showed up. She had crossed a couple of states to get to Alabama. She had brought a pretty tablecloth, a beautiful birthday cake, streamers, balloons. I was allowed to get up and walk just to the dining table to see it, and then I went back to bed. I heard a couple of my friends in the dining room talking and eating cake. I thought it was just another dismal birthday, despite the party trappings.

Mama had come all that way to see me on my birthday. Yet she argued with Bigmama and Bigdaddy over something or other that night and the next day she was gone.

After growing well and taking my missed school tests, it was summer and my parents came for me. I had to go with them, and it was back to Helena, Arkansas again. Daddy bought me my class ring. The days wove past like clouds floating so slow they hardly moved.

We moved again, to a big old house with a little store in front of it out in the middle of fields somewhere. Daddy opened it when he got home from work and on weekends. Brent and I drank too many cold drinks and ate too much bologna sliced from a roll. I hated the back of the house. I had to share a bedroom with my brother. I was too old, I wanted my own room, but there wasn’t an extra bedroom. Brent and I fought, chasing one another and acting up when our parents weren’t around.

One day I walked into the living room and Mama was sitting in the chair in front of the TV. “The President’s been shot,” she said. I sat down and watched the assassination of John F. Kennedy over and over as they played it. I watched Oswald taken into custody and was watching when he was shot by Ruby. I knew this was momentous, a turning point in history.

Weeks later Mama was sitting in the same chair and I came to her to ask about something. I didn’t know she had been drinking, and I didn’t know she had gone into the rabbit hole of depression again. She reached up and hit me in the face with her fist. I stood back from her, shocked. She’d never physically abused either me or my brother.

She hates me.

That’s what I thought. It was all that could make sense to me if she was going to hit me with her fist. I ran to my room and withdrew into myself. I decided I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I wouldn’t do anything. I’d just sit there—forever, if I had to.

I moped around in an ugly silence like that for days. One day Mama told me to wash the dishes. I always did as I was told. I was not asked to do a lot of work around the house or anything, but usually no one had to ask me. I hated the messy house Mama never cleaned up. Since I was little I had picked up behind her, putting away all the paperback books, the newspapers spread everywhere. I emptied ashtrays, took out the trash, and washed dishes when I couldn’t stand to walk into the kitchen.

But this day I was sixteen years old and my mother had struck me for no reason just days before. I wasn’t talking to her. I was going to sulk until justice was done, until I was given an apology.

When Daddy got home, she told him I hadn’t obeyed her and I had refused to wash the dishes. He slipped off his belt. “When your mother tells you to wash the dishes, you’ll wash them.”

“No, I won’t. Let her wash them.”

I had never talked back to my parents. This was a first. In all the sixteen years of my life I had never spoken this way to my parents. Daddy, taken by surprise by my refusal, began to whip me with the belt, hitting my legs. I put out my hands to stop him and backed into a corner of the messy kitchen. He kept whipping me. I wouldn’t cry. If it killed me I wasn’t going to cry. Finally, welts rising on my legs and hands, he stopped and looked at me, now confounded by my silence. “Are you going to do the dishes?”

I nodded and he walked away. I stood washing the dishes and cursing them both in my thoughts.

I didn’t know it then, but Daddy would never raise a hand to me again. It was the last whipping or spanking I’d ever receive. I think today I probably deserved that sudden and brutal corporeal punishment. I was disrespectful and if it had been allowed to stand, I would have continued that way. As bad as my parents might be, I was a kid and I didn’t have that right to disrespect them--even if I thought they deserved it.

I was growing up. I was getting tired of this life I was forced to live with people who were crazy and sometimes mean. I thought all these things as I washed dirty dishes and let tears fall down my face. I hated people who drank alcohol, people who couldn’t control themselves. I hated how Daddy ripped my mother’s self-respect from her when she sometimes tormented him. I hated Mama for just being who she was. I didn’t believe I belonged in this family. I was as imprisoned as any inmate in an institution. I vowed once I got out of this prison, I’d never come back. Ever.

Though it would take another two years to make my escape, I finally did it. I was the most morose young girl through all of high school. I had boyfriends, but I wasn’t about to get serious about them. I knew my life wasn’t meant to be wasted and “love” could wait. I had study to do, college to attend, a future to mold with my own two hands. If I was to really escape, I had to make something of myself. Alabama wasn’t my future. Dead ends weren’t my future. I would excel in some way. I would give in the act of writing fiction from my depth of emotion and whatever understanding I’d been able to cobble together from my life experiences. I couldn’t do that with a mere high school education.

I put my head down and kept my grades high. That was my ticket out of hell.

I spent much of my time reading books and imagining a different life. Books were a release from reality and an escape into other worlds that were more pleasant than my own. Protagonists not only survived, they were heroic, overcoming odds even worse than what I faced. They were true and sure and their hearts were in the right place. They treated others not only with respect, but with love and understanding.  I scoured the school libraries for books teens weren’t reading. I read books that were beyond my years, looking for advice and for wisdom, looking for ways to make a future completely different from my past. Books were my saviors. If I meant to write them one day, I must read them, every good book I could find. I began to hone my tastes and began my own study of the great writers the world had produced. I may not ever be a great writer, I thought, but I knew if I worked hard enough and learned enough, I could be a good one. That was my singular goal. I would be a writer, a good one. I’d tell the truth as much as I could manage and my characters would be true. They might be flawed, as all people were, but in the end they would always be heroic. If I knew one thing it was this: the world needs heroes. Male, female, child or adult, this old world was never going to make it far without them.

The Christmas that Never Was

One afternoon after school in Helena my new girlfriend, Sharon, asked me to go to the store with her.  Once there in the little corner store, she began to sneak back to the candy aisle and I saw her tuck a bag of candy into her skirt front under her blouse.  I started toward her, shaking my head.  She shushed me and said, “You take one.”

     I don’t know why I did it.  Because she did and I admired her, I guess.  You can do a lot of things you shouldn’t just because you don’t know how to say no and you like people.  I grabbed a bag of Hershey’s chocolate kisses and pushed them into my skirt.  We walked out the door and ran down the alley laughing.

     That night at home I couldn’t sleep.  I had the candy bag under my pillow and it was like having a loaded gun.  It was going to kill me.  I was damned.  I had been taken to church every single Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday in Alabama.  Mama sent me off to whatever church Bible school was close by every summer I was with her.  Stealing was plain wrong.  I was a sinner and I was going to Hell for absolute sure.

     Crying now, I drew the candy bag from under the pillow and walked slowly into the living room where the only one still up was Mama watching television.

     “What’s wrong?  Why are you crying?”

     I brought the stolen candy from behind my back and held it out to her. 

     “Where’d you get that?”

     It was hard, but I had to say it.  “I stole it today when I was at the store with my friend.  She took a bag and told me to.  Now, Mama, I know it was wrong.  I can’t sleep because I stole something that wasn’t mine.  Mama, what am I going to do?”

     Mama was not always a monster, nor was she a monster about all things in dealing with her children.  She took the bag from me, now partially emptied, and pulled me to her.  She hugged me and told me what a Good Girl I was for telling her. 

     “We have to take it back,” she said.

     I’d seen her and Daddy march Brent back into a store one time for taking a lollypop they hadn’t paid for.  It wasn’t going to be pretty, but I deserved whatever I got.  I was a thief.

     “And you can’t see that girl anymore.  What’s her name?”

     This was the worst of it, worse than facing the store owner as the thief I was.

     “She’s not bad, Mama.  I don’t think she’s ever done this before either.”

     “What’s her name?”

     “Sharon.  She lives out on that farm outside town, remember?”  I’d spent the night there and seen the big tractors working the wide fields.  I’d eaten at her table, the meal consisting of plain, but generous portions of farm foods—corn on the cob, green beans, slices of tomatoes so big they almost covered the plate.  I’d laughed with her at night and ridden in her Daddy’s old car with her driving us fast down back roads, raising the dust behind us.  I had never known another thirteen-year-old girl who knew how to drive a car.  (Although my Daddy was already teaching me in his 1955 red and white Ford.)

     Mama said, “You can’t see her again.  You can’t go to her house.  I don’t want you hanging out with thieves.  Look what she made you do.”

     I could have tried to explain she didn’t actually make me do it.  I made myself do it.  I was singularly guilty and blaming her wasn’t fair.

     Yet, I knew my friendship with Sharon was over, and she would never understand it.  I could never tell her why.  I saw her one more time.  Three years later when we lived on Moon Lake, Mississippi, Sharon came by the lakeside café my parents owned.  She was married already at sixteen and had a little baby on her hip.  I had envied her and the wonderful farm she called home, but now I only felt sorry for her. I knew her childhood was over, she’d never finish high school, never go to a prom, never hold a good job. She had sealed her fate and it was very sad.

     Was Mama right?  Was Sharon’s urge to steal only one indication of a morally corrupt girl?  Was she destined to wind up married and a mother too young, her education ended, her future determined?  I don’t know.  But it could be Mama had saved me from going down a wild road I might not have been able to get off. Even people in your life you don’t get along with or who often cause you despair can also teach you morality. No one is ever black or white, totally wicked or totally saintly. Mama often tried to do her best by us.

                                                                 #

A lot of important events happened at the house in Helena, Arkansas across the street from the school.  I sneaked out at night, joined up with other kids on the prowl, and we broke into the cotton gin behind the houses and climbed three and four stories high on cotton bales. 

     I met another girl down the street and late at night we’d both sneak out and dance in the dewy grass in our nightgowns, pretending we were fairies.  I see me now in my mind’s eye, arms wide, head back and eyes on the stars overhead as I twirled and twirled until I was dizzy.  So silly and immature! 

     I guess I did a lot of sneaking out.  I didn’t get into any trouble or really do anything very dangerous or against the law, but sneaking out to play was the whole of my teenage rebellion. 

There were no gang initiations, gang rapes, gang drive-bys with guns blazing.  There must have not been many pedophiles, or else they didn’t happen to be around where I grew up.  There weren’t many “fast” boys and fewer fast girls.  If you were thirteen, the most you did was climb to the top of the cotton bales or dance beneath the night in a nightgown, pretending you had wings attached to your back and pointy-toed slippers on your bare feet.

     A thirteen-year-old today has seen five thousand horror movies, played thousands of hours of video games, shopped in malls for purses and shoes that cost as much as a bus trip cross-country.  Some, if not the majority of them, have given and received oral sex, practiced their intercourse techniques, and know all the words and all the jokes their parents tell before they tell them.

     It was simply a different time.  A lifetime away, two generations distant.  It was like a fantasy because today people can’t believe the world was so non-threatening and open for children to explore.

     About the worst thing that happened in Helena came around Christmas time.  Mama was obviously in one of her “up” periods.  She was baking and cooking, decorating the house, and buying gifts.  The day she told us we were all going to Alabama for Christmas Day, I almost fainted with happiness.  I’d get to see Bigmama!  Oh, God, it had been so long, and I missed home like it was a hole in my heart.

     On Christmas Eve Mama’s mood began to plummet. All indications pointed to a spree coming on.  She had already packed all the presents in the car and fried all the chicken and baked all the biscuits to take with us on the trip.  Brent and I ran around the house laughing and chasing through the blinking Christmas lights on the tree. We were like puppies let loose from a kennel. 
            Then I don’t know what happened, but it spelled a catastrophe.  Daddy said something to her.  Or she just fell headfirst into the dark hole that always followed her around.  Whatever precipitated it, the trip to Alabama for Christmas was off.  Totally, permanently, forever OFF.

     “We’re not goddamn going!”  Mama screamed and Brent and I stopped in our tracks.

     Daddy went to her and tried to calm her down, but she shoved him away.  “Get your damn hands off me, you son of a bitch.  I told you we’re not going.”

     “But Mama, the presents are in the car…” I said, trying to reason with her and change her mind quick before it set like concrete and we were all stuck fast in it.

     “I don’t care if they’re in the car!  I don’t care a damn about the goddamn presents.  I’m going to my room and shut the door and if anyone tries to come in I’ll fucking kill you, DO YOU ALL UNDERSTAND?”

     Jesus.  Please, Jesus.  I went to Daddy.  “Daddy, do something.  We would have been to Bigmama's by morning.  Can’t you make her change her mind?  Please, Daddy.”

     He shrugged and looked miserable.  He went to the bedroom door she’d slammed shut and whispered things to her.

     She screamed back at him and told him to go away or she’d rip his fucking heart out.

     I couldn’t let this be my reality.  I had been looking forward to the trip for at least a week.  My heart was set on it.  The gifts were in the car, the picnic lunch was stowed away there, the map, the pillows for our heads and the blankets to cover us in the back seat.  Bigmama and Bigdaddy were expecting us.  She had presents and planned the Christmas meal.  Even now she was in her four-poster bed waiting for us, one eye open.  We had to go.

     I would die if we didn’t go.  The alternative was to sit here in front of a tree with no presents beneath it and gloomily watch my mother fall completely to pieces. 

     As I often did, I took the problem into my own hands and went to the bedroom door.  I knocked softly and called her name.  “We have to go, Mama.  I want to go real bad.  Mama, it will be fun, you know that.  Daddy said he’s sorry if he made you mad.  Mama, are you listening?  Mama?”

     For the first hour she wouldn’t speak to me.  In the next hour of pleading, she tired of my whining and said, “Get away from the goddamn door and leave me the hell alone.  I MEAN it.”

     I began to cry, first quietly, and then in earnest.  “Mama, you can’t do this.  Mama, this is the worst thing you’ve ever done!  Can’t you see that?  You’re hurting me.  You’re hurting all of us.  Me and Brent want to go.  Mama, we have to go.  I’ve missed Alabama so much and Bigmama’s waiting for us.  Please, Mama, please, please, please.”

     I went on this way for hours more.  Most of the night, actually.  I cried until my heart drained its blood and dried to a husk in my chest.  I had been heartbroken many times, but this time it felt as if I might not get over it.  I remember the grain in the wood of the door. I remember the feel of the floor where I sat, my head against the door, crying, begging. I remember praying my mother would come to herself and remember it was Christmas and we had a nice trip to make that would bring all of us happiness.

 It felt as if this time I would never find a way to forgive her the suffering she had heaped upon me. I know it wasn’t personal, it wasn’t as if she was deliberately trying to hurt me. She was a woman beset by demons in her mind and she just couldn’t handle dealing with my heartache or anyone’s expectations.

   She would not relent. 

     Christmas morning came and Daddy brought in the cold fried chicken and the presents meant for us. 

     Brent and I, crestfallen and tired, opened them without expression. We sat quietly watching the Rose Parade on the television.

     There was no turkey swimming in its juices or ham studded with cloves and decorated with pineapple slices and cherries.  There was only the cold fried chicken and Daddy leaving through the door like he’d never come back, though we knew he would, he always did.

     Mama stayed in her room, silently brooding over whatever horror had entered her. I don’t even remember when she came out, a different woman again, and life returned to its semi-normal pace.  Christmas was over, the New Year loomed scary as a nightmare, and I didn’t know when I’d ever be released or how I would ever get back home to Bigmama.

     I knew now for certain I was cursed.  I was locked into this family with an insane woman and none of us could do anything with her beyond locking her in a padded cell. 

     She was Yvonne.  She would have her way.  The rest of us were the worker bees and she was the Queen of the hive.  If she felt well, she would bake you mouthwatering cookies and cakes.  If she didn’t feel well, you’d pay for it in one way or the other.  She wasn’t going to walk through Hell alone, nosiree. She was taking you with her.

I tell you this from the perspective of my thirteen-year-old self. I explained earlier I know about mental illness now and I have come to have some peace about my childhood. When it sounds as if I hated my mother, then that’s how it was—when I was thirteen and so terribly unhappy. Children do not understand about inner demons. They judge their parents by the parents of their friends. My mother was different from anyone I ever met and being at her mercy, I was surely always angry and sullen about what kind of life she was creating for me. I had no power. I just had to live through these growing up years the best I could. I began to keep some silent little spot hidden away in my heart where I could remember happier days so when the bad days showed up I could live through them without something permanent shattering inside me. A mother cannot neglect and willfully destroy her child’s happiness and then expect that child to grow up and love her the way she wants.

Being good, quiet, and making high grades in school was the way I kept myself going. I could excel and be proud, my small pride enough to keep me afloat in this sea of unhappiness. That and the hope sometimes I’d be taken home again to my grandmother.

                                                                             #