She was as pretty as sunshine on roses. She was small, delicate, and her hair was almost black. She had huge brown eyes, and a big red Pontiac Le Mans she used to drive me around in when my rolling junk, third-hand muscle cars were dead on the side of the road. My girl cousins said she looked like a porcelain doll, that she was perfect. She was smart—made all A’s in high school and college—and nice, too. I’m pretty sure she still is.
Her daddy read Rex Stout novels and her momma made the best macaroni and cheese casserole I’ve ever had. They raised their only child in a middle-class neighborhood of brick houses and well-fed cats. The dogs all had collars, and didn’t bite.
We met in Jacksonville, when I was working for the Jacksonville News. She was a sophomore at Jacksonville State, training to be a social worker and working part-time at the Weaver City Hall, answering phones. Her daddy kind of liked me, I thought. Her momma kind of didn’t, but that is often the way of it, cliché or not.
Not long after I got my first good full-time job, at the Anniston Star, I proposed. I got the ring at Service Merchandise, on credit. When I gave it to her, she cried.
I proposed standing up. I would have gotten down on my knees, but they were tore up on the inside so bad from playing ball, I knew that if I ever got down there, one or the other of my knees would lock and she would have to help me up. She didn’t mind.
I was not afraid of getting married. Getting married was what you did if you were any damn good, at least in that culture I grew up in. I was not my daddy, I kept telling myself. I would not be him.
I was in my early twenties. I had a good job. I had done as much of what we tactfully refer to as “runnin’ around” as a man can, without being shotgunned to death climbing out of someone’s bedroom window. It was time, I believed.
I was no kind of playboy. It was just that, unlike a lot of my brethren, I learned early on that there is no way to make someone want you if they don’t. You can either waste time fantasizing about how to win your woman back, or you move on. It might not be the stuff of love stories, but in the time it takes to dive to the depths of misery in a bad relationship, sulk on the bottom, and then come clawing out for air, I could have thoroughly enjoyed being dumped three or four more times, as bad as that sounds. I was not a heart-on-your-sleeve kind of boy. I did not write love letters, did not sit and wonder why they left me or I left them. They came and went by an average of about two a year, often—you could time it by a clock—when they found out who I really was, where I came from.
She did not seem to care about my shaky reputation or the fact I was what some people would have called, but only behind my back, white trash. She treated my momma with respect. She did not seem to think she was better than her, than me, than the other people I cared about. She had a good heart, an open one.
We got married at Weaver First United Methodist Church, a fifteen-minute drive from my home, in July. I wore a white tuxedo, and more erudite people might think I looked like a fool. At the time, I thought I looked damned spiffy.
When she walked down the aisle it took my breath away. I had heard of that happening my whole life, and I thought it was just something people said. But it really did. It took my breath away.
My brothers and Uncle John and one of the best men I ever knew, Tony Estes, stood up with me. Tony was married to my cousin Jackie and used to loan me clothes to date in, because I didn’t have any. I would have asked my uncle Ed to stand up with me, but I thought he didn’t want to. I should have asked him. Then all the men who had ever meant anything to me in my young life would have been there, in one photograph.
My momma came and sat in the front row, the first time I had seen her dressed up in my life. She wore a bright-colored dress that looked like it was maybe tangerine sherbet, and someone had curled her hair. I was proud of her.
I have given more thought to buying cars than I gave to getting married; it just seemed time, and she seemed like the right one. I had my last-second doubts; I wanted to cut and run. But I stood there and took it like a man. We drove down to Panama City, Florida, for a honeymoon at the Silver Sands Hotel. We came back sunburned, to set up house.
We lived in a three-bedroom brick house that was the nicest thing I had ever lived in. Her daddy helped us with the down payment, I think because I horrified her whole family by casually mentioning that maybe we should just get a trailer. We had brown wall-to-wall carpeting, three ill-tempered, ill-mannered Siamese cats, which I secretly despised, and a huge Saint Bernard dog named King, who I loved. She went to school and worked, and I just worked. She got her degree, and I was proud for her.
Every summer, we went to Panama City with her parents and grandparents and stayed in their time-share condominium. Every winter, we had finger sandwiches, punch and divinity candy at their house on Christmas Eve. They were nice people, her family. I was grateful for it, all of it. All you had to do to become a part of the middle class, I now knew, was work hard, act right, and sink roots so deep that you can never, ever budge.
In 1985, when I was in my mid-twenties, I got a job offer from the Birmingham News, the biggest newspaper in Alabama, at almost twice my salary. It was only seventy-three miles down the road, but the journey and the new job took all my time. I worked for my old editor, Randy Henderson, who wanted me to do big stories. He called it swinging for the fences, and suddenly I didn’t mind working until midnight or getting home after 2 A.M. I won some awards, covered a wall in them.
It was about that time, one night sitting in the living room, that she told me she might be having a baby. I tried to shape a smile even as something that felt like hot lead seemed to course through my chest, and I thought that I would surely die.
We had talked about having children, someday, but someday had seemed like such a great, safe distance away. The thought that it was happening did not just frighten me, it terrified me, consumed me. And I couldn’t say a word. For days, even after that hot-lead feeling had cooled, it lay like a weight on my chest.
It was several days before we found out it was a false alarm. She looked at me, not accusing, just knowingly, and said, “Aren’t you disappointed, just a little?” I lied to her and said I was.
I withdrew from her then, or maybe we just withdrew from each other. She said we lived more like roommates than husband and wife, and she was right. I told her it was only because I worked so hard, so long. She was smarter than that. The months went by. One night, early morning, actually, I came home from working on a story about a prison riot. I was exhausted and hungry. I was standing in the glow of the refrigerator, making a bologna sandwich, when she came out and said that we needed to talk.
I just nodded my head. The next day I took my clothes and my dog and left. I was my father’s son, after all.
I was not mean like him. I got drunk twice a year, three times at the most. I had never done violence against her, in any way. It was not in my character. We never yelled, we seldom fought. I often worked overtime and did magazine stories on the side to make a decent living, and was determined, absolutely, to surpass my father’s sorry standards for being a husband. Still I failed. I failed in thinking that was all there was to it.
It ended, I have told myself and told others, because the only thing I had time for in my life was the work, that the only passion in me was for it, those lovely words. That is partly true. I love writing the way some men love women.
But the greater truth is that I could not bear the thought of someday having a child, of having that child depend on me, rely on me, need me. I would have, I am sure, dragged myself through hell to give that child everything I could, but somewhere, deep, deep in the place we keep our greatest shame and fear, I was still afraid I might, just might, be like him. Not mean. Only weak.
It is a funny thing. I have been hurt doing my job. I have stood in a crowd of massed bodies, knowing that at any second the mob’s mood could turn and they would tear me apart. But I cannot remember being so afraid as I was that day in that living room, sitting on the Naugahyde couch by the console TV, pictures of cats on the wall.
She married again, several years later. I heard that she had a baby girl. I am sure she is a smart and pretty child, if she takes after her momma.
Some year or so after the divorce, she walked up behind me in a grocery store parking lot. She kissed me and smiled at me, and that made me glad. I know she does not hate me. I was only wasted time.
You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.