Broward Junior College, a couple of buildings and a mess of sandspurs, offered little by way of aesthetics, yet a lot by way of education. Most of the students worked full- or part-time. Money wasn’t an issue. No one had any. There was barely enough to buy the baseball team uniforms. The professors, no doubt seriously underpaid, overperformed. My favorite was Neil Crispo, a political science professor. He could prod, cajole, trick even blockheads into original thought.
After the University of Florida, J.C. might seem a comedown and I suppose technically it was. I liked the place. I liked the students and I liked my professors.
Four of us chipped in together to buy gas for Carol Warner’s car. In one of my classes we got to talking, and a few other women listened in and we formed a driving club. Carol, the big wheel because she owned this ancient piece of machinery, is now a respected educator in Colorado. If anyone had told me then what she would become, I would have collapsed laughing. Warner, respectable? She was a stand-up comic. I figured she’d go to Hollywood. She made the better choice.
The year rolled by uneventfully because I took a full class load, worked in a nearby gym after class and then walked home or took the bus. Sunday, my one day off, I mowed Mom’s lawn, trimmed her hedges, did whatever needed to be done around the house. I inherited Dad’s jobs. Every now and then I could borrow the old Plymouth and head to the Royal Palm Polo Club to hot-walk ponies and watch good polo.
Jerry, in his first year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina, wrote regularly. Chemistry came as easily for him as English, history and political science came for me. He liked the combustibility of chemistry. My favorite science was physics. His favorite humanities course was Latin. He was a better Latin student than I was even though we both made A’s. His Latin was grammatically perfect and precise. My translations veered toward fluid English. I never minded boogering the grammar. This used to infuriate my professors, who would force me to produce a grammatically exact translation. Then they’d let me fiddle with it.
Our minds meshed in an unusual way. In the areas where he was precise, I was imaginative. In the areas where I was the queen of organization, he was the spontaneous one. Although the creative one in a traditional artistic sense, I was truly the logical, pragmatic one. He was emotional, romantic, impulsive at times.
How UNC survived him I don’t know. He was wild. While I was wearing out sneakers walking to and from work, he was throwing tacky-waitress parties. You had to come dressed as the tackiest waitress you had ever seen. I don’t think he ever gave a party that didn’t dissolve into an orgy.
His letters, filled with piquant detail and written in his left-leaning script (he was left-handed), described his friends and enemies with a jaundiced eye.
After he debauched a large number of the fair sex, he turned his attention to his own. He wrote me that since I might be a lesbian, then he might be a homosexual, and even if he wasn’t, he’d try anything once.
He cited me as telling him, “Don’t die wondering.”
I wasn’t sure that my quote related to his current fuckathon, but it pleased him. The human mind can rationalize anything.
He promised I was the only woman he would ever love.
Interestingly enough, I never made a similar promise. His jealousy about men friends—not even lovers, but friends—erupted on the page and in person. I made the mistake of writing him that I liked Steve Cairns, a basketball player at Broward. Jerry couldn’t wait for Steve to enlist in the air force after junior college. I prudently never introduced the two men to each other.
Steve was conventionally heterosexual. I was not. Had I been stone straight, I would never have been conventionally heterosexual. He was a good young man, and being great-looking didn’t hurt him, either. But our romance couldn’t flower. We wanted different things.
I’d met a few gay women at the junior college. Being gay or straight didn’t seem to be a defining factor at Broward Junior College. Getting good grades and transferring on was paramount, and everyone was working, putting aside money.
During this time, Mother held her breath, fearing that Aunt Mimi would hear of my possible queerness. “This wouldn’t happen if she was your blood child” is really what she feared, because Aunt Mimi would have the whip hand.
A few times I borrowed Mom’s car to go to a dance bar in western Fort Lauderdale. Val’s, a big barn, hosted mostly gay men with a sprinkling of fruit flies (straight women who hang out with gay men) and the odd lesbian. I was the odd lesbian. I danced with the boys, watched them drink and pair off, and then I’d drive home at sunrise.
Through Bill Stevens, her boss, Mom knew every cop and minor public official in Broward County. The police cruised the parking lot writing down license numbers. Unless they could catch someone in a homosexual act, there wasn’t much they could do except harass. However, one of them told Bill I was down at the bar and Bill told Mom.
If you’ve ever seen a fighting cock in the pit, you’ve seen Mother. She flew all over me.
“What’s the cop going to do, Mom, put it in the paper?”
“No, but people talk.”
“Talk is cheap,” I quoted back to her. It did not produce the desired effect, a glow of maternal appreciation for how much she’d influenced me.
“Don’t sass me. I am still your mother!”
“Yeah, that’s a misfortune we both share.”
She cracked me one. Mother, quick with her fists, rarely hesitated to use force when argument failed. I ducked and turned my back because I hate getting hit in the face. She hurt her hand so bad it swelled up and eventually turned black and blue, which meant I had twice the amount of housework to do.
Forget borrowing the car. She did take me down to a used car lot. I saw an old Buick convertible for eight hundred and fifty dollars, but that might as well have been eight thousand dollars. I found a Buick older than that, a 1955, still out of reach. I’d kill for that car today. Weren’t the portholes terrific? I loved the big chrome smile of the Buick.
Thanks to the miles of walking, though, my legs drew whistles.
Mother took in laundry, ironing and mending to augment her income. The mortgage payment was sixty-six dollars a month, so my rent covered most of that. We had to eat, maintain a car and feed Sunshine and Skippy, who gave Mom more comfort than I did.
Mother and I battled off and on. About everything. She wanted me to be like her. I couldn’t. Her gifts weren’t my gifts. Mother must have believed I would be a duckling, imprinted at birth to waddle after her like Julia Ellen trailed after her demanding mother.
Julia Ellen, hands full with work and a son, absorbed the strain of trying to please a mother and a husband, the two vastly different. Uncle Mearl might have dampened Aunt Mimi’s meddling ways, but then he’d have been stuck with her ire.
Aunt Mimi, while siding with Mom on any issue concerning me, enjoyed my reduced status far too much. She knew I’d had to come home to save money. She didn’t know the rest of the story. Mother harped on my profligacy, and if there was one subject Sis expanded upon, apart from religion, it was “A penny saved is a penny earned.” I had not been a spendthrift. I burned at her chastisement but I said nothing.
What good training for my later life. I am adept at deflecting attention away from the real issue to a lesser, still real issue. Time and again I would need to be the whipping girl to give other people the room to succeed.
You learn to bury your ego. Since mine was inextinguishable, like JFK’s flame, I needed this lesson.
Fortunately, another event pulled Mother away from berating me for dancing the night away with a bunch of gay men.
Easter dinner, held at Sis’s that year, brought the whole crackbrained crew together. If nothing else, it was good for a laugh. Uncle Mearl had bought Aunt Mimi a home organ—a good one, too. Various keys produced background rhythm such as brass, strings, a bossa nova beat. Aunt Mimi, enchanted with the banjo effect, regaled us with “Tiny Bubbles” against this background. This was after we pleaded, begged and otherwise adored her. Once she had banged out a few tunes she would plop her grandson Michael on the bench. Another one to inherit the considerable musical talent in the family, he outplayed his grandmother, who pretended she was pleased. She was pissed.
This led to a recitation of her back operation, which must have occurred when the earth was cooling. Anyway, it occurred either before I was born or when I was too little to take proper note of its impact. We heard every detail, from the washing of the back to kill bacteria to the first slice of the knife. You would have thought she was conscious. On and on this medical adventure unrolled. We smiled. We tried not to check our watches. Mother tapped her foot on the carpet. Why anyone has a carpet in Florida is beyond me. Aunt Mimi felt more is more.
There I sat as the Jesus-with-thorns picture opened and closed its eyes. Christ kneeling at Gethsemane reminded me that we all pray to have this cup pass our lips. Then again, the Crucifixion meant the cup didn’t pass. Surrounded as I was with ample dolorous evidence of our good Lord’s corporeal suffering, I realized in a flash why Aunt Mimi decorated with torn and bloody Jesus: She intended for us to suffer.
Can’t say she didn’t warn us. Well, she rattled on. Mother, having surrendered the limelight for nearly an hour, folded her hands in her lap, not a good sign.
“Didn’t you say the pin they put in your back is gold?”
Nodding vigorously, Aunt Mimi indicated with her thumb and forefinger how big the pin was. “Gold. The body accepts it better.”
“I’d like some for outside my body,” Mother replied, which drew snickers from the rest of us.
Aunt Mimi, loath to stop, waved off her sister with a hand motion and fake smile. “Oh, Juts, you’re such a card. Eighteen-karat gold.” She twisted around and pointed to the spot in her back.
Mother rose, heading for the bathroom. To fool us, she opened and closed the door. She tiptoed into Sis’s bedroom, where she opened the chest of drawers. I heard her open it, but Sis, in love with her own voice, missed the telltale squeak.
Within a minute Mother strolled back, that nonchalant expression playing across her face that I knew meant “Duck!”
She carried a manila envelope of considerable size.
“I believe your X rays are in here.” She wiggled the envelope.
“Give me that.” Sis lunged for it.
Mother sidestepped her, pulled out an X ray and pointed to the rod, clearly visible, while Sis kept batting at her.
“It’s black!” Mother triumphantly announced.
We leaned forward for a better look. I grabbed the X ray from Mother, pointed to the spot and passed it on. It was black as the ace of spades.
Aunt Mimi, empurpled with rage, shouted, “You’ve spoiled my story!”
“No, I separated fact from fiction.”
The rest of us screamed with laughter. Aunt Mimi didn’t know that gold would show up black on an X ray. If Mother knew she kept it to herself.
Mother flounced out. I followed. Aunt Mimi’s threats wafted out the front door.
“Windbag.” Mother cheerily smiled, checking the rearview mirror as her sister doubled her hand into a fist, shaking it at her.
Mother giggled, hooted and guffawed the short distance home. I laughed, too. Watching Mother get someone’s goat was worth the price of admission.
Mom was her old self again.