Mother dragged to work. Hollow eyes, no laughter, not even a flash of hostility—she was dead in a way, too.
The night after Dad’s funeral I had a dream that woke me. I was mowing the lawn. Dad walked toward me from the railroad tracks. He was young again, in his thirties.
I said, “Dad, you’re dead. What are you doing here?”
He smiled at me and said, “Take care of your mother.”
That’s all I remember. But I sat up in bed and knew I was the head of the house. I also remembered with a shiver that about two weeks before Dad died, I’d dreamed of his death. I’d run into the bedroom to make sure he was alive. I’d forgotten about that dream in my relief. Funny, that I would dream such a thing.
We had no money. Even with Dad working, our annual income was two thousand dollars a year.
Aunt Mimi suggested I quit school and go right to work.
Mother was in no condition to consider anything. I didn’t want to talk to her about it.
Aunt Mimi leaned hard on me and I leaned right back.
My senior year in high school meant the world to me. I wasn’t going to give it up, but I was willing to work after school and on weekends.
Before I could go job hunting, Jimmy Evert offered me more work at the tennis courts. Sometimes I would come in in the morning, before school. The city’s tiny budget had a little room for me, or so I thought. Jimmy could well have paid me out of his pocket and told no one. He’s that kind of man. His help meant I could have my senior year. Other people surprised me. Adults, as you would expect, had a real understanding of how deep a blow Dad’s death was. The men at the courts would buy me hamburgers. One of the ladies made me a pretty tennis dress since I had only white gym shorts and white T-shirts.
Hans made a point of bringing me books.
Without my being aware of it, I was watched out of the corner of many an eye.
God knows I needed help, but I was too young and too dumb to know it. I didn’t know what to do with Mother, though. She’d get up in the middle of the night, go outside and call Dad as if she were calling the cat.
Skippy and I would wake up, and Sunshine, Mom’s poodle, would be next to her, scanning the yard. We’d open the front door and bring her inside.
Befuddled, she’d implore, “Where’s Butch?”
I’d put her to bed but then I couldn’t go back to sleep.
True to form, she never missed a lick of work. The house sparkled. She cooked, washed and ironed. She gardened.
She hardly spoke. That shocked me. Even Aunt Mimi hardly spoke.
I buried myself in school. I hung blue and white yarn dolls from Mom’s rearview mirror to show school spirit. I knocked out great college board scores, which took some of the pressure off me. I knew that high grades from a southern high school wouldn’t be enough to get me into a good college.
My service club, Anchor, offered plenty of activity to keep my mind off home, and as a member of the student council, I had keys to get in and out of school after hours. Sometimes I’d turn a library light on and read. I didn’t want to go home.
Other times I’d stay at the Holiday Park courts until the last person left and Jimmy shooed me out.
Around this time one of my girlfriends, and I will never quite know why she did this, told me she was dying. One curveball had beaned me already. Two?
I told Betty Pierce. A few of us huddled together and decided we’d make her senior year great. We had before us the example of one of our husky football players from the class of 1961, dying of leukemia. And one of the most popular girls in school, Vicki Leaird, had died three years earlier because the hospital didn’t have an iron lung. Death at a young age was real for all of us.
One night, this girl stayed late at school. She started crying and seemed to feel so awful. I hugged her and told her things would get better. She kissed me and I kissed her back.
It never occurred to me that this was a lesbian act. I didn’t think in those terms and I still don’t. Determined to put aside sex until I could become financially established, I wasn’t going to fall for boys or girls.
She was good company, a hard worker, and I really liked her.
In looking back, it’s clear our relationship was so innocent. We wrote one another romantic letters. We kissed and hugged. We hadn’t a clue about sex, really, but our relationship was clearly romantic.
As far as I was concerned, I was going to marry Jerry Pfeiffer even though he hadn’t asked me. I was quite untroubled by the prospect of caring for two people and I just figured whatever she needed, we’d all pitch in. This kissing stuff was okay. I liked it fine.
Her mother read the letters I wrote her. My mother read the letters she wrote me. Mom, still grieving, was waking up a little. The girl’s mother, Mrs. Busybody, visited Mom and told her we’d have to stay apart.
When I came home that night, Mom told me all this. I was mad but not too upset. I told Mom that the girl had said she was mortally ill. Boy, that burned Mom up. But she got hold of herself and didn’t call Mrs. Busy-body. She let it go, telling me to steer clear—I had enough to contend with in my life. I agreed. Whatever my sexual inclination might be, Mom didn’t care. You married, had children, saved face and did whatever you wanted to do discreetly.
Who knows what Mrs. Busybody said to her daughter? The girl panicked and told our friends that I was a lesbian. She, of course, wasn’t.
I couldn’t believe it. Then I thought about it some more. Maybe I was a lesbian. Mostly I didn’t give a damn.
I did what I always do. I shut up.
Snickers and titters followed me. One boy took it upon himself to insult me on a few public occasions. I had always liked him, so I let it go. If he thought he’d scare me into going to bed with him to prove I wasn’t gay, he figured wrong.
A couple of my teachers cracked down on me, but most of them didn’t pay much attention to what was going on, for which I was grateful.
My senior year turned into one long siege. The tennis coach made me run extra laps. When that didn’t break me down, she told me that if I even thought of looking at another girl in the locker room, she’d throw me off the team.
I would have given anything for Betty Rinehart to be out of the convent or Jerry to be home from college.
Mother, on her feet but miserable, crossed swords with me over college. She and Aunt Mimi pounded at me about going away.
I’d had it. I’d applied to Ivy League schools, Duke and the University of Florida. Duke accepted me straightaway and I wanted to go. Aunt Mimi hit the ceiling. After a fight wherein I was called everything from “ungrateful” to “selfish” and had the usual “You aren’t one of us” thrown at me, I left the house and stayed out all night. I slept in the student council room at school.
When I came home the next night, Mother, a bit frightened that I’d walked out, said, “You know how I feel, but if you want to go, I won’t stand in your way.”
I replied, “How about if I go to the University of Florida? It’s not so far away. If something happens, I can take the bus home.”
The bus ride back then was about twelve hours—if two roads crossed, the bus stopped.
She thought about it. “Well, that Smith College is awful far away. Even Duke is far away.” That meant she liked the idea as much as she could.
I promised her that I’d have greater earning power with a college degree and that she would never have to worry about money as long as she lived.
I kept my promise.