Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her.
—SIR JOHN VANBRUGH
THE FIRST time I saw Charles I was in ninth grade. As I boarded the school bus that day, I was struck by the handsome driver with the sharp blue eyes and easy, wide smile. In fact, I was smitten. Now I had a whole new subject to study on the way to and from school. The regular driver, Charles’s father, had found full-time carpentry work, and so Charles, a high school senior, replaced him, driving the bus for the rest of the year. Since my stop was the first on Charles’s route, I was always the first on the bus. Once those doors closed behind me, I wouldn’t even sit down. I’d drape myself over the metal bar next to Charles and start talking. As we bounced over the rocky dirt road in the early morning, I’d often interrupt our conversation with a playful “Watch out for the pothole!”
Charles always said that he’d noticed me several months beforehand when for the first time I walked into Asberry Baptist Church one day wearing my red sling-back shoes. My family didn’t attend church, but I’d convinced my mother to let me go to the closest church in our community. I was eager to get out of the house on Sundays and thrilled to wear the fancy heels I begged her to buy for the occasion.
Of course, I was more interested in seeing my friends than in being saved. Squirming on the hard wooden pew, I studied the women’s colorful hats in the pew in front of me instead of listening to the preacher. Charles was always more serious about church than I was. He took great pride in the fact that his grandfather, Reverend Holder, along with hill farmers from surrounding communities like Skull Mountain, Dry Bone Hollow, and Ant Hill, had built the one-room church made of stone.
It wasn’t long before we started dating. Living in a town the size of a frog pond, we didn’t have much to do. Most of the time, we went to the drive-in theater and stopped at Dairy Queen for a hamburger afterward. Sometimes we hung out at the cemetery, dodging through the graves, some dating back to the Civil War, to sit under the large oak tree smack-dab in the middle of all those headstones.
But as much as I adored Charles, there was another young man in my life. I grew up playing with my stepcousin Johnny, who was the son of Papa’s third wife, Beulah. Johnny was quite a bit older than I was, already a pilot in the air force. When I turned fourteen, he sent me a letter telling me I’d grown into the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. His flattery fired up my imagination. I’d never felt very pretty. In fact, in first grade I cried so hard for curls that my mother finally took me to Ruth’s Beauty Parlor, where she got her once-a-year perm. There the beautician wrapped my hair in steel curlers, their spikes digging into my scalp. She covered my head with a thick milky-green shampoo before she hooked me up to a silver octopus whose electric legs transformed my plain pageboy into perfect Shirley Temple curls.
Inspired by Johnny’s letters, I dreamed of traveling the world with him, asking my mother every day after school, “Has the mail come?” I’d moon over the framed picture Beulah gave me that I kept on my dresser. As I admired his smooth face, his expression so serious, I imagined him flying fighter planes in Korea. In my reverie, I saw myself an officer’s wife, entertaining other officers’ wives.
When Charles would visit, I hid Johnny’s picture in my top drawer even though he never went into my bedroom. The truth was that my daydreams about Johnny were a kind of comfort to me. I worried that Charles still pined for his first girlfriend. Her mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, and when her daddy hassled Charles so badly, afraid the same thing would happen to his daughter, Charles moved on. My fears proved to be true when he started dating her again during his first year at Jacksonville State University when he and I didn’t see each other as much. Finally, he broke it off with her for good, and we started dating exclusively.
Meanwhile, I’d finally come to my senses about Johnny. He was halfway across the ocean most of the time, and when I saw his sisters around, they insisted that he was dating dozens of beautiful girls. I finally realized that I didn’t know the first thing about love if I was moping around for someone I barely knew anymore. We’d simply played together as kids. What I loved had nothing to do with him: I loved the idea of him and my fantasy of living in exotic places.
Living out in the country, I didn’t know the ways of the world. What I knew about sex I overheard my uncles teasing about at Aunt Lucille’s dairy farm or learned from my friends in the locker room at school. When I discovered I was bleeding for the first time, I was terrified. Without a word, my mother handed me torn bedsheets.
But despite my lack of worldliness, I had my secret ambitions. Even though most girls, if they weren’t already married, worked in the cotton mills or became secretaries after graduation—the really smart ones studying to become teachers or nurses—I wanted to be a lawyer when I was in high school. Where my aspirations came from I haven’t the foggiest, since we didn’t keep a single book in our home.
Later, encouraged by my math teacher Mrs. Self, I decided I wanted to be an engineer. In class I marveled at the fact that she could catch a mistake before a student finished solving an equation on the blackboard. I whizzed through my math tests, the purple ink always damp, emanating a strong, almost skunkish smell from the mimeograph machine. For me, calculating numbers felt like listening to my favorite music.
Mrs. Self also happened to play bridge with Mr. and Mrs. Gray, the most educated couple I knew. On Saturdays they drove from Jacksonville to our house to buy fresh butter. When I heard the sound of a car in the driveway I’d peer out the window to see Mr. Gray, a retired chemistry professor, behind the wheel of his red convertible, his bow tie somehow still neatly tied. I wondered if he slept in it. He was so different from my uncles, more like my history teacher, a slim, energetic man the boys made fun of for living with his two aunts and walking to school carrying an umbrella.
Sometimes I was invited to the Grays’ house in town. Eating dinner in their formal dining room, I worried about which fork to use as I tasted unfamiliar dishes like asparagus casserole served on delicate, rose-patterned china. I recalled what Granny Mac said about how my father had the finest of everything and drank from crystal glasses at their mahogany dining room table. My father’s father, who’d been a foreman for Southern Railroad, supervising the black crew fixing the railroad tracks, sounded downright rich. Returning a gun he borrowed for Granny Mac to keep for protection while he traveled all over Georgia with his crew, he accidentally shot himself in the groin as his wagon bounced over the tracks. Gangrene killed him. After his death, Granny Mac packed up all the fancy furniture and fine china—except for a tea set she now kept in the trunk under her bed—and moved with my father to Aunt Lucille’s farm in Alabama, where she kept most everything stored away.
When it came to my education, it was Mrs. Self who had hopes for me, and she asked Mrs. Gray for help. She wanted Mrs. Gray to convince my mother to let me take college courses at Jacksonville State University, a teachers’ college only a short walk up the hill from Jacksonville High School, half the day during my senior year. Mama said no, of course. It cost too much. Anyway, a high school education was all a girl needed. So my senior year, at my mother’s insistence, I took home economics instead of earning college credits, almost failing my sewing assignments.
I’ll never forget the sting I felt when the week before graduation, the principal stopped me in the hall and congratulated me for being near the top of my class of one hundred. On the way to class, I was sick to my stomach, as if I’d swallowed a bottle of castor oil.
I found my way around most of my mother’s objections, but I didn’t know how to work around that conundrum. I’ve often speculated about how different my life would have been if I’d gone the eight miles down the road to Jacksonville State University. Later, when I went to work, I took every seminar and training class I was offered. But it wasn’t the same.
NOT LONG after I realized I couldn’t go to college, I took the picture of Johnny and gave it back to Beulah. I wrote him my last letter. I didn’t know Johnny the way I’d come to know Charles, a steady worker and a churchgoing man. Johnny was a figment of my imagination. I’d seen Charles, calm and competent, steer a school bus from slipping off an icy bridge. Charles was the one who taught me how to drive. We circled the school parking lot in his Chevrolet or blew down the white road made of chert gravel in front of my house, a trail of milky dust fading behind us. It didn’t matter what we did or where I went with Charles. We always enjoyed each other’s company. Being with Charles made me forget how lonely I was as an only child. And on some level I knew he was the one, the way you just know some things, deep in your soul.
During my senior year Charles dropped out of Jacksonville State University to take a full-time job at General Electric, located about twenty miles outside Possum Trot, so that he could earn a steady paycheck. The last thing he wanted to do was farm for a living like his father, Willis. When relatives provided Willis, an illegitimate child, a place to live on their farm, he was treated as an outcast. While the rest of the family ate supper, Willis fed the cows and pigs. Later, Willis treated Charles almost as harshly on their family farm. I knew Charles admired the fact that my father wasn’t a farmer and respected his job as a diesel-tank mechanic.
Once Charles was employed with a decent salary and benefits, he bought from his aunt Sudy a piece of land, located several miles from my house. Then he immediately started building our home. By December of my senior year the walls were dried in. I don’t remember Charles ever formally proposing. We just talked about it like we did everything else. At least part of the reason we decided to get married when we did was that we could afford it.
The day I told my mother I wanted to marry Charles, I was sure she’d pitch a fit. I wasn’t used to her saying yes to anything I wanted. And in this case she needed to agree, as I was still a minor. In my heart, I wanted more than anything to marry Charles. There was hope: He was the only boy of the few I’d dated whom she’d liked, and she appreciated the fact that Charles was such a hard worker.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and tried to gather my courage. I waited until she was in the middle of cooking fried apple pies; that way I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. Then I told her, fast and to the point.
When she turned away from the black skillet and looked at me, she simply asked, “Are you sure?”
I nodded. I was seventeen. I was ready.
She finished frying her first batch of pies, then made me sit down at the wooden table. “You know, what you see is what you marry. What you see across the table won’t change all those years you’ll be married, so don’t think you can change another person,” she said.
I sat silently, sweating in the warm kitchen. Grease dripped down the side of the black skillet on the stove. Now I had nowhere to look but straight into her eyes.
“I suppose now you’ll have someone else to count on besides me and your daddy,” she said. Then she stood up. “If that’s what you want, I’ll sign the papers.” She turned to start chopping more apples for her next batch.
It was that matter-of-fact. She didn’t even have to discuss it with my father. I was more than a little stunned. I had been ready for a fight. Instead, I wanted to jump up and dance, but I sat at the table for a minute trying to contain myself and figure out how to say thank you. When Mama started frying the next batch, I stood beside her, chopping the rest of the apples in silent gratitude, picturing the whole time what my own kitchen would look like.
ONE COLD afternoon when school let out for the Christmas holiday, I got married. Charles picked me up at school and rushed me home to change. My mother had taken me shopping earlier in the week and helped me find my dress. It was perfect. In my bedroom, shivering a little, I pulled the glistening navy dress over my body. Pinning my hat on my head, I looked at myself in the mirror above my dresser, my face blurred behind the silver netting sprinkled in rhinestones. I touched my white collar, all stitched in pearls. I felt important and grown-up. I grabbed my pocketbook off the bed, ready to show Charles how wonderful I looked. Then I thought of my mother; I wanted her to see me, too, to recognize me as all grown up. I stood still, listening for her in the kitchen. It was silent. Charles was waiting in the car, so I took one last look at myself, trying shake off my disappointment that my mother hadn’t been there to see me off. I didn’t expect my parents to come to the wedding. No one in my family had been married in a church, and my mother had made sure I understood that this occasion warranted the least amount of expense and attention. I guess Charles’s parents felt the same way, because they didn’t come either.
On the way to the preacher’s house, we picked up my cousin Louise and my friend Carolyn, who giggled all the way there. On the surface it felt like just another outing with friends, except that I was so dressed up and excited. When the preacher opened the door, he was still wearing the dirty coveralls he wore driving his peddling truck to sell flour and seed. He told Charles and me to take a seat on his sofa in the living room. I thought he was going to make us wait while he changed, but he just stood in front of us and started preaching.
“Now look each other in the eye and hear what I have to say.” Louise and Carolyn stood behind him smiling almost as much as I was. Our smiles disappeared pretty quickly, though, when it became clear that we were in for a sermon. I could see my friends’ eyes turn gradually toward the window to the pastor’s tree-lined yard as they braced themselves. My mind wandered back to the times when Louise and I were little, how we liked to go to the nearby Congregational Holiness Campground to watch the holy dancing in the wooden tabernacle, whitewashed a dull white like the concrete bunk buildings surrounding it. Later, when we played in the woods, she stood on top of uprooted pine trees, blown over by recent tornadoes, and acted like the preacher while I swayed my hands in the air singing “Jesus Loves Me.”
The preacher snapped me out of my reverie when he asked, “Have you thought this through?” and paused for our response. A shock went through my body, a startling sensation as strange as hitting your funny bone. When we didn’t answer right away, he said, “Marriage is a lifelong commitment. Once you’re married, it’s for eternity. You will have to look at the world differently. When you’re married, you’re no longer an individual, but part of a whole. The marriage, not yourself, comes first.”
All of a sudden I didn’t want to look Charles in the eye. I could get lost in those blue eyes, usually full of comfort and promise, but in that moment I felt I needed to separate myself. The preacher’s forceful words unsettled me. I was glad the netting covered my face. The words he used, like covenant and sacrament, sounded ominous. Now I felt like a mischievous schoolchild being scolded by the principal rather than the dressed-up, grown-up woman I’d been looking at in my mirror.
As the preacher carried on, I pretended to adjust my netting, worried that Charles could see my concern, wondering if he really loved me as he’d said he did. I reminded myself that everyone in the family had whispered that I was pregnant; otherwise, why would I marry before I finished high school? One of my aunts had marked her calendar, waiting for me to start showing. The preacher’s funereal tone of voice made me question what the rush had been anyway. I suddenly felt I might need some more time to think. Yes, he’d been my best friend for the past three years, and so I’d been convinced I knew Charles well. Until now. Did I know him well enough to bind myself to him forever? If Charles was thinking the same thing, he didn’t flinch. That reassured me a little, but I continued fidgeting to avoid looking him in the eyes. My head itched like I had a swarm of mosquitoes under my hat. When the preacher made us stand up and started the official ceremony, I thought I was going to faint. I could barely repeat my vows. I couldn’t help but think that if he had given us the same sermon the day before, I’d have backed out. As it was, I was dressed and we were already there. I decided we’d just have to follow through and hope it worked out.
In the car, it seemed that Charles had been stirred up by the preacher’s words after all. All the way to Atlanta, where we planned to celebrate our honeymoon, we didn’t say a word. Neither of us even spoke up to say we needed to stop for a restroom break. When we got to the motel, we both ran straight to the bathrooms before even glancing at the man behind the desk or bothering to check in. It wasn’t until we stood in front of Rich’s department store, listening to Christmas music, admiring the winter wonderland and watching Mr. and Mrs. Claus wave to the shoppers, that our mood finally lifted.
WHEN WE returned from our weekend honeymoon, Charles still hadn’t finished building our new house, so we lived at my parents’ house. In the mornings I had to blink twice when I saw Charles, not Granny Mac, sprawled in the twin bed across the room from me. Granny Mac had moved in with my aunt Lucille, where she’d lived before. She was still nearby, but I secretly missed the sound of her bustling around in the early-morning light as she wrapped her long dark braid in a bun around her head. I’d forgotten how irritated I used to get when she rummaged through my belongings. Instead, I remembered all the times I was upset with my mother and Granny Mac sat me down on the bed. She’d scoot out her wooden trunk, tucked under her bed. Handing me a gold bracelet or her opal ring to wear, remnants of the life she lived before my grandfather left her widowed so young, she smiled and hummed as she set her hand-painted teacups on the quilt for us to play tea.
Now when I opened my eyes, Charles shared the bedroom I’d slept in since I was seven, its walls plastered with pictures of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. His large frame almost swallowed the small bed. On the weekends, Charles and I spent the night at his family’s house in his childhood bedroom, his younger brother and sister following us around and staring at us like we were aliens from Mars who’d landed in the cornfield.
After we married, I went back to school. The only difference in my routine was that when I came home in the afternoons, I joined Charles, my father, and his uncles to help finish the house Charles was building for us. I completed my homework later in the evening, when it was too dark to work.
That April, the day I turned eighteen, we moved into our unfinished house. My mother rocked in her chair on the front porch and cried. Her tears took me by surprise. It was one of the few times I’d seen her cry. After all that fussing over the years, my mother didn’t want me to leave. And when I did, she’d expected me to move a stone’s throw from her like she did with Papa. I looked around one last time. The path I cut through the woods to Louise’s house would soon be overgrown with wisteria and sumac vines. I recalled how Louise and I used to make a game of throwing cotton bolls at each other when no one was looking. I thought about how much I’d miss my father, who loved to make a special treat of any occasion. Those trips to town on Saturday, he looked like a king dressed in his best suit and one of his dark felt hats. Before we left, he always slipped me a quarter to buy an Archie comic book and a Hershey bar at Watson’s Drugstore. I wondered what happened to the miniature doll bed he made me from apple crates—the one I used to stuff Buzz into—that Christmas Mama said there wasn’t any money for presents.
As I loaded my few belongings into Charles’s car, my eyes rested on Papa’s house across the road. He was one person I wouldn’t miss.
Driving away, passing fields that would be ready for planting soon, Charles held the steering wheel, his arms taut from years of farmwork and the last months framing our house. As I clasped the box holding Granny Mac’s fragile teacup set in my lap, I wanted to grab Charles’s arm and stop the car.
THE MORNING Charles laid down the law, I sat on our bed in our bedroom, fully dressed and ready for school, my stomach clenched with anxiety. Charles was still in the kitchen finishing the ham and biscuits I’d made for us before he set out for work and dropped me off at school on his way. I hadn’t eaten a bite.
Now I looked out the window at the dirt Charles had prepared for my flower garden. When I’d reminded him about the senior trip that morning at breakfast, he acted surprised. My trip was only two weeks away, and then there was graduation. I wanted to be with the friends I’d spent my childhood with before we went our separate ways.
“But you’ve known all along I wanted to go,” I’d insisted. Mrs. Self’s school trips were famous. I’d looked forward all year to seeing the White House and New York City.
“It’s not a good idea,” he’d said without emotion.
I could feel that familiar anger well up in me. It may have been his law, but it sure wasn’t mine. I’d worked hard for that trip. For weeks my father had driven me up every back road in Calhoun County to sell the second-most magazine subscriptions in my high school so that I could afford to go. I’d told Charles months earlier that I was going. Over breakfast, as he tried his best to eat his food while it was still hot, we went back and forth until, exasperated, he finally said, “You’re married now. Married people don’t go on trips alone.”
He meant married women. Surely, he wasn’t worried about the rowdy boys in my class who drove across the state line to buy liquor in Georgia every weekend. I suspected they’d misbehave as usual on the trip, but that had nothing to do with me. I remembered that Charles had made sure that I was indifferent when he made me throw out a silly necklace one of them had given me a long time ago. I sighed as the morning light streamed through the window, a strange contrast to my dark mood. Charles clearly expected me to be a “good wife,” and that meant I was to stay at home where I belonged.
But this wasn’t one of our ordinary squabbles over blankets or thermostats. I hated the way, in the middle of the night, Charles, fast asleep, jerked the blankets to his side of the bed, leaving me with one thin sheet, shivering. It killed me when he changed the thermostat behind my back; he insisted on keeping it at 65 degrees, practically freezing me to death. Now I really felt left out in the cold. I so wanted to find a way through this. I thought and thought as I smoothed the bedspread over and over again, knowing I’d be late for school and Charles for work. And it hurt even more because I had to admit to myself that Mama was right this time. She’d told me when we were shopping for my wedding dress that Charles would never let me go on the trip. I didn’t believe her—why did he have to let me, anyway? I’d read the Good Housekeeping advice at Mrs. Gray’s house—that a good wife didn’t question her husband’s judgment because he is master of the house—but that wasn’t supposed to apply to me. Daddy had never told my mother what to do. And I felt like I could almost always get my way with him. If Daddy had nothing but a dollar left in his pocket and I wanted a steak, he’d buy it.
I called to mind the time I was determined to have a coat my mother refused to buy. One late afternoon right before my father left for work, I’d found him in the living room flipping through one of my comic books. Dressed in his denim pants and the white work shirt Mama starched as stiff as barn wood, he smelled like diesel fuel, a smell I’d almost come to like.
I sidled up next to him and asked him if he’d get me that coat I’d been talking about. He kept his money folded neatly in his pocket. He didn’t look up but turned the page, the palm of his hands calloused as hard as a butternut in places, the whites of his fingernails stained an indelible black from engine grease.
“Sugar, if you want that coat, I’ll get you that coat.”
It was August and hot as blue blazes outside, but I wore that coat every day. Mama was so mad that, for months, every time I turned around I found myself with more chores to do.
I got up from the bed at last and opened my closet door to look for that coat. Did I have any say-so in this relationship? Feeling the thick brown wool, I knew that even though I had my own money for the trip, I wasn’t in control of my life. Our ideas about marriage, specifically what it meant to be a wife, were as diametrically opposed as two magnets facing each other the wrong way. Suddenly I felt like a fool. I should have known that our different backgrounds would come between us. Religion and the traditional values that accompanied it loomed large in Charles’s family. He often reminisced about the Sunday picnics after church when the old folks gathered to gossip while the young folks played horseshoes the whole afternoon. His sister would tell how when they’d be sitting on the porch on Sundays and the preacher came by, Charles ran around slinging all the dirty dishes into the stove and stuffing the dirty clothes into the wringer washing machine.
Charles’s best memories centered on the church, his second home. My main memory of church was Mama complaining the few times we went about the reverend dipping into the church offerings to pay for his gas. And she had absolutely no patience for those snake-handling preachers.
Still in my bedroom a half hour later, I just couldn’t let go of that coat. I didn’t want to see Charles, never mind ride with him all the way to school. I knew he was patiently waiting for me, probably hoping I’d accept his decision if only he gave me time. He’d been clear that it was his decision to make. As he sat at our brand-new kitchen table, Charles had flat-out insisted, “If you loved me, you’d stay home.”
His eyes had widened in disbelief when I said, “If you loved me, you’d let me go.”
As I took my treasured coat out of our closet, I knew I was going to Washington no matter what Charles said or how upset he was. It was way too hot to wear that coat on a sunny spring day, but it was my shield, as it had been with my mother many springs earlier. I put it on, ready to go to school, my blood still burning. In the car, Charles reminded me that a husband cleaves unto his wife; they become one flesh.
Now I understood the true meaning of my wedding sermon. When the preacher had said that the marriage would come first, he’d meant Charles would, and there’d be a price to pay if I didn’t submit.
I had only been in Washington one day when I called Charles at GE on the pay phone to check in. A coworker answered and told me Charles was on his way to the hospital in an ambulance; no one knew what had happened. I thought that maybe he’d had a heart attack, so I took the next train home.
At the time, Charles was running tubes in the furnace room, where it’s so hot you’re supposed to take salt tablets to keep from becoming dehydrated. Charles hadn’t taken them that day, nor had he drunk enough water. But he wouldn’t admit he’d gotten dehydrated on purpose. I knew in my gut that he’d done so in order to get me to come home early.
It took a long time for me to get over his stunt, and I wished a thousand times I hadn’t come home. I had always known that there’s one thing I hated more than anything else: being told that I couldn’t do something. Now I knew what was second on my list: being tricked and manipulated. In our first few months of marriage, Charles had crossed both lines.
NOT LONG after that, we argued over the hospital bill that we had to spend what was left of my trip money to pay. Night after night, while he read his Bible, I pretended to sleep, not wanting to talk or kiss him good night. I was stiff with anger. I felt as if my heart had closed.
One night, after about a week of this, I pulled the covers over my head extra hard and asked roughly when he was going to turn the light out.
He sighed. That irritated me even more. Finally, I heard him put his Bible on his bedside table, where he always left it. The room became quiet. We lay in silence, the only sound the cicadas’ crescendo outside our window. I thought about my uncle who’d told everyone we’d be separated in a year. I could feel sadness creeping in, softening me. I didn’t know how this was ever going to be resolved, but I was tired of being mad.
Charles pulled the covers from my face and leaned into me. I didn’t push him away. We found each other again in the dark.
“I don’t want you to be upset anymore. I don’t want to lose my best friend,” he whispered later.
Before we fell asleep, we promised we’d always talk through our troubles whenever we disagreed. Throughout our marriage, this pact served us well. After that night, no matter how angry we got with each other, one of us would back down and end the argument by reminding the other that we were best friends.
I began to realize that no one’s marriage is perfect; you just make the best marriage possible. My senior trip wasn’t the first or last time Charles got into his religious mode, thinking he was lord and master and forgetting that I was a real person. But I knew Charles loved me like no one else.
TOWARD THE end of my senior year, I interviewed at General Electric, where Charles worked. The Monday after graduation Charles and I drove to his friend’s house, where we carpooled with him and some other guys sixteen miles into the small town of Oxford. I clocked in at GE, thinking the sooner I started working, the sooner we’d be able to put a little more distance between us and the life I so wanted to leave behind. I was going to be like Aunt Robbie, who like many women during World War II had been hired in at Goodyear while the men were fighting the war.
As one of the younger women at GE, I tended to keep to myself. The older, more experienced women worked the upper end of the conveyor belt. Down at my end of the line, we put the finishing touches on the tubes made for televisions and radios. All the women dressed in white uniforms, so we could spot any debris that might corrupt the tubes.
Operating the foot pedal, I welded together two threadlike filaments. With hundreds of tubes coming down the line, no one had time to talk. You could only go to the restroom during a break. At first, I felt like that episode of I Love Lucy where she’s working in the chocolate factory and the belt speeds up so fast she has to stuff her mouth and hat and brassiere with chocolate drops. We couldn’t stuff our bras with scrap material, but before we left the plant, management would rifle through the aspirin and lipstick in our purses, looking for pieces of scrap.
At first, my foot hammered the pedal too hard and I generated too much scrap. Even after I got the hang of it, the machine would get too hot, scorching the filament. But I learned to block out my surroundings and focus on lightly tapping the pedal. There was nothing I could do about the machine’s temperature.
We were paid by the piece and given a bonus after we made a certain number of tubes. When we exceeded the production numbers, we were quickly broken up, our synchronicity scattered, so that we wouldn’t have to be paid extra. But when it came to the men there, often the women worked against themselves, acting as ridiculous as schoolgirls. I was glad I was married and not caught up in all that nonsense.
One supervisor had a bad habit of choosing one woman at a time to pick on. When he came around to picking at me, I got so frustrated that I actually started looking for another job, interviewing at Sears and the nearby hospital. When I realized I could make $40 a week somewhere else, or hang in there and keep making $150, I decided to tough it out. I refused to be run off. So I kept earning my paycheck, saving for a new dining room suite we’d put on layaway.
AFTER ABOUT a year of working, Charles, who had joined the National Guard, was stationed at Fort Belvoir right outside Washington, D.C., for six months. I wanted to take a week off to go see him. At my age now, I know six months isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things, but back then I missed Charles so much it felt like a part of me had been amputated. When I put in my request, the foreman said no. We usually got vacation time in July, when the plant shut down, or around Christmas, when production slowed, so my union representative said there wasn’t much I could do about it.
I told the foreman I was going anyway and he’d see me the following week. I really expected to be fired, but I knew I could find a job somewhere else, with more responsibility and better treatment, just less pay. I was willing to take that risk.
The night my father drove Sandra and me to the Atlanta airport, I almost didn’t make it onto the plane. I’d convinced Sandra to go with me, since her husband was stationed there as well. We scrimped and saved for our plane tickets and took the cheapest flight, the red-eye. Sandra balked at the sight of the plane. I didn’t want to climb those steps into the plane’s tiny door any more than she did, but she announced that she was staying home. I said, “Oh, no. You are going with me,” and dragged her onto the plane.
Things only got worse when we arrived. It occurred to me as we zipped past Fort Belvoir on the Greyhound bus that something was wrong. Charles had told me to catch the bus to the base, but I’d never seen a city bus. In my mind, the word bus meant Trailways or Greyhound. I jumped out of my seat and told the driver we needed to turn around. He said, “Lady, you’re on the wrong bus. We’re not stopping, so you might as well sit down.”
I stepped down closer to him and heard myself say in my best Edna imitation, “Listen, you have to stop this bus right now.” By then, the base was miles behind us. The passengers became quiet, peering over the tops of the headrests. He stopped the bus.
Dressed in skirts and heels, with cars and trucks whizzing by us, Sandra and I lugged our suitcases across the six-lane highway. I found a pay phone at a gas station and called a cab. I’d never been so happy to see Charles in all my life. That week we never left the base. I’d spent all my sightseeing money on cab fare, which cost more than my plane ticket.
The next Monday morning when I showed up at work, my supervisor didn’t say a word. Back on the line, as I singed the two tiny threads together and tapped my foot pedal ever so slightly, I replayed telling him I’d be back in a week, feeling the satisfaction of speaking up, of having choices. After I returned from visiting Charles, my supervisor never picked on me again.
TWO YEARS later, since I’d been the last one to be hired, I was the first one to go when GE went into layoff mode. Shortly afterward, I found out I was pregnant. Even though I wanted to look for a new job, Charles and I had always planned on having two kids, so it also felt natural to focus on building our family. I settled in at home, cooking, gardening, and tending to our new daughter, Vickie. It turned out that my mother was right. Home economics came in handy after all.
She may not have come to my wedding, but every day my mother, dressed in a man’s jumpsuit, appeared on my doorstep. Charles begged me to ask her if she could please stay home a couple of days a week so we could have the house to ourselves. I was grateful for the fact that she slung that soiled pile of cloth diapers through the wringer washer on the porch daily. Nursing Vickie, I’d watch her through the window as she unpinned the frozen diapers off the clothesline, her hands stiff and red with cold.
I was also grateful for how she doted on her granddaughter. It reminded me of how she took to Uncle Howard’s two boys, Billy and Buddy. When I was young, the boys, still toddlers, lived with us for several months. She rocked and loved those boys like I’d never seen. After their mother moved away with them, my mother grieved. Watching her care for Vickie, I knew she and Vickie would have the close relationship she and I never could.
Three years after Vickie was born, Phillip came along. His birth was the first time I made headlines, when the Anniston Star read, JACKSONVILLE WOMAN BEATS THE STORK. As we sped to the hospital in the middle of the night, escorted by the policeman who’d stopped us for speeding, we had no idea that the strange screeching sound we heard was Vickie’s poor cat, who’d been asleep on the engine—after that, he didn’t stick around much longer. Seconds after Charles dropped me off at the emergency room—he hadn’t even parked the car—I delivered Phillip.
Nothing I’d known had prepared me for motherhood, and as Vickie and Phillip grew I was scared not to go to the doctor at the slightest hint of sickness. Uncle Howard used to say that Papa killed my grandmother Lillie when she had cancer. Spending all his money on liquor, Papa neglected to take her to the doctor. He also crippled his son Leonard when he refused to get Leonard’s broken leg set. Like the cat sleeping on our warm engine, one day Leonard just took a notion and disappeared. So any time of day or night, if the children showed a sign of a fever or ear infection, I hauled them to the doctor, Edna sitting in the backseat of my car soothing the sick child in her lap.
EVEN THOUGH I read Dr. Spock religiously, as a young mother I was overwhelmed by the fatigue and rawness of my emotions, spinning from tears to frustration in a second. And Phillip, allergic to everything he ate and even his baby blanket and sheets, cried through each night of his first two years. He never slept, despite the soy formula I had shipped on a Trailways bus and delivered to Crow Drugs each week.
Throughout the night, I’d sit in the wooden rocking chair in his room, holding him in my arms. Otherwise, he screamed. Mute with exhaustion, I felt especially vulnerable, as tender as the soft spot on his newborn head. When Charles left for work in the morning, I listened to his car crank up and envisioned eighteen-wheeler trucks smashing into him on the way to work. Then I’d follow my imagined tragic scenario to a vision of me, alone, trying to raise Vickie and Phillip.
Many mornings I brought myself back to reality by admiring the beautiful straw flowers and zinnias outside my bedroom window. One of the first things I’d done when Charles and I settled in that spring of my senior year was plant a flower garden. Mama never did grow anything you couldn’t pick and eat. Planting my annual seeds was comfort I’d chosen a different path. One particular morning after rocking Phillip all night, gazing beyond my blooming flowers, I was struck by the familiar sight of fields I’d known as a child. I closed my eyes and continued to rock Phillip. The truth of the matter was that I was living the same life as my mother.
