A Ticket to the Circus (7 page)

I worked through the fall semester, then quit the minute Larry graduated in January. I hated the job, which I wasn’t good at, either, as it was keeping an accounting of eyelets and shoelaces and whatever else went into the shoes, and numbers are not my friends. Still, Larry and I had fun those first few months, looking at our thick white gold rings, saying “my husband” or “my wife,” playing house, and, most important of all, sleeping in a real bed instead of the backseat of the car. We rented a two-bedroom apartment in Atkins near my parents, and I learned to cook, experimenting on poor Larry, since my mother had never taught me. When I was growing up, she thought it was easier to do it herself than try to teach me, and I agreed. Her mother never taught her, either, so she probably thought that if she could figure it out, I could, too, and eventually I did.

I made a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners, spaghetti, and pizza from a Chef Boyardee mix. (There were no pizza parlors in those days, or Chinese restaurants or Italian or anything remotely ethnic. They didn’t even sell garlic in some markets. Nobody knew what to do with it.) I would use the crust mix from the pizza box and make the dough, then add more tomato sauce to the small can provided and put Jimmy Dean sausage or pepperoni or mushrooms and mozzarella cheese on top. It was better than any I have had since. The rest of our meals were fried something or other. For meat we had ham or pork or bacon his parents cured themselves, beef they grew, chickens that ran around, and the fish and occasional game Larry brought home, like
deer or quail or squirrel. I would eat the quail, watching for bird shot that might break a tooth, but I wouldn’t touch the deer or squirrel at all. His mother cooked that.

Mrs. Norris had happily cooked game all her life—deer and squirrels (with the macabre squirrel heads on the platter, their little eyeholes and teeth peeking out of the crispy brown crust), but I couldn’t bring myself to even taste it—it was too close to rat for me. Larry’s mother and father gave us part of a calf they butchered every year for the freezer, and they had a huge garden. I still salivate thinking of the big ripe tomatoes, the fresh corn taken right out of the field and boiled before it lost its sweetness, and the squash and okra we picked and promptly sliced thin, dipped in flour, salt, and pepper, and then fried. We ate chicken-fried steak, cornbread and pinto beans or green beans cooked all morning with a piece of salt pork until they were a greasy wonderful mush, and baby green onions; turnip greens with hot pepper sauce and homemade pickles. My mother-in-law tried to teach me how to can and make jelly and jam, but I was not that into it. I once fell out of a mulberry tree trying to get berries for jam and landed in a prickly pear patch. Everyone thought that was hilarious except me. We picked ripe peaches and apples out of trees, and flicked wasps off juicy yellow plums. They were so drunk on the sweet juice, they didn’t even sting.

I drove the tractor while they harvested huge black diamond watermelons, and we would sometimes bust one open in the field and eat the red hearts out with our hands, juice running down our elbows. When we were in high school, boys were always sneaking up on the mountain to steal watermelons at night, and sometimes a farmer kept a shotgun loaded with rock salt to shoot at them for their trouble. The doctor was always sighing and picking rock salt out of someone’s behind. It was weird to know that some of my friends were helping themselves to my boyfriend’s family’s living, but it was the adventure as much as the watermelons they craved, and they never took too many.

Larry’s midterm graduation finally came, with a ceremony where I pinned the lieutenant’s bars on his new uniform and we got our picture in the paper. Then he went off to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for basic training, and I went back to college for the first half of my junior year. And that’s when my troubles began.

I
soon discovered that being married put me into a whole new category at Tech. I was excluded from all kinds of things, like being in the Athena Troop, an elite drill team the ROTC members chose that performed at football games at halftime in short, tight uniforms and hats with gold feathers. I got my hand-embossed invitation in the mail, then they found out I was married and rescinded it. Of course, there was no question of being in the homecoming court, or being the sweetheart of any fraternity. I was married. I was twenty years old and might as well have been eighty as far as college life was concerned. The only thing I still managed to do was a little modeling. A photographer named Bill Ward had been hired to take pictures of all the contestants for the Miss Russellville pageant program the year before, and he later asked me to pose from time to time for local department store ads in the
Log Cabin Democrat.
An older man of twenty-seven, he was married and was also the choir director at church, so there was no romance, but he did have nice green eyes and longish blond hair, which was cool. He’d started a new trend of posing his subjects outdoors near brooks and in meadows of wildflowers, old barns, and woods instead of in a stiff studio, and everyone went to him for their wedding announcement pictures.

Ever since high school, I’d had the impossible dream of becoming a model, and I read
Glamour
and
Vogue
every month. Seeing myself in the
Log Cabin Democrat
ads made me believe it might be a real possibility. One of the teachers from Atkins had a daughter named Sarah Thom who was once a successful model in New York. Before the wedding, I got up my courage and wrote her a letter, included some pictures Bill Ward had taken, and asked her if she thought I had a chance. I suppose it was a secret last-ditch effort to go for a dream and not settle for life in a small town, cleaning fish and teaching school, so I didn’t tell anyone else I had done it. Sarah Thom sent the pictures on to Eileen Ford, her agent, who sent me back a form letter basically saying I should forget it and seek another career. It was a harsh wake-up to
reality, and I filed that dream away. But it was fun to be a
Log Cabin Democrat
girl once in a while.

I moved back home to save money after Larry went to basic training, and my parents were even tougher on me than when I was single. They thought I should be home by nine o’clock so nobody would think I was doing anything improper. “What will people think?” was their mantra. I couldn’t go to a dance or party, and even going to the movies with my girlfriends was suspect. I spent a lot of evenings watching TV and writing to Larry. In those days, a long-distance phone call was an
event worthy of mention in the social section of
The Atkins Chronicle
, as in, “Viola Higgins’s daughter, Sue Ellen, called her all the way from Visalia, California, to wish her a happy birthday.” Long distance was expensive, and stamps were only six cents.

Modeling for Bill Ward.

Then Russellville had its centennial celebration. They hired a company out of Virginia to come and organize the show, and to get me out of the house and doing something fun, a girlfriend of mine named Toni brought me to a meeting about it. The man they sent as the director was an adorable guy I’ll call Edmond who was a dancer full of graceful energy. He was small and compact and had a neat black beard, longish hair (but not offensively long for the older folks), and wore yellow aviator sunglasses. I fell madly in love (or something approximating it) with him at first sight. Of course, being married was much more restrictive than going steady, and the last thing I was ever going to do was cheat on my husband; even the thought of it was enough to make me worry about hell, but these things have a life of their own, hell or not, and I found myself alone in the house one day when he dropped by to discuss some skit he wanted me to be in. I swear nothing was going on except talk, but my parents came back while he was in the living room and knew immediately from the pheromones in the air that this guy was trouble.

I found myself making excuses to stop by his office, reasons to linger after rehearsals. He needed special meetings with me to work on a song, he needed help writing some dialogue. We kissed once, a stolen one, and then we kissed a lot. He was terrific at it. It was much more painful than the almost-kisses with Jerry in the backseat at the drive-in, because now that the cork was out of the bottle sex-wise, there was no putting it back in. I was used to a lively sex life and my husband was gone. But I didn’t dare cross that line.

School was out in May, I’d completed half my junior year, and it was time for me to join Larry. He had been transferred from Fort Knox to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and I was going to be with him there until he had to leave for Vietnam right before Christmas. Edmond had given up on getting me into bed—it was just too frustrating, he said—and we agreed we’d never see each other again. But the day before I was to leave, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up my courage and went to his apartment early in the morning, driving around the block about ten times first.

It was a stupid thing to do, for many reasons, but one was that it never occurred to me he might have another woman there. Fortunately, he didn’t, and when he saw me standing in the doorway, he grabbed me and pulled me into the bedroom. It took about one minute to get undressed, and another two or three from start to finish. It was over before I really knew what had happened. Because he was such a great kisser, I had expected the rest to be something spectacular, but it was like those pastries in the bakery case that look so delicious but taste like white paste. I got dressed and left in a flood of guilt and anxiety, and the next day I squeezed into my green Volkswagen, which was packed to the roof, to drive to Fort Campbell and move into army housing. I’m sure my parents breathed a sigh of relief when I left town. I was a ticking bomb waiting to go off at any minute. I’m sure they had no idea the bomb had already gone off, and had been a dud.

F
ort Campbell is right on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, and our house was spot on the line, our living room in Tennessee and our bedroom in Kentucky. It was small, a two-bedroom bungalow with gray linoleum floors and the walls a freshly painted chalk-white. I can’t bear flat white walls or the color gray, but we weren’t allowed to paint them, so I had to settle for hanging up colorful pictures and putting down rugs to make it seem less like an institution. The kitchen had old appliances from the fifties, and nestled in the white metal cabinets was a roll of roach killing paper packed tight with the nest of a thousand roaches. Across the street was a golf course, handy for Larry, who was good at most sports and liked golfing. The house was a two-family bungalow, the other side a mirror of ours but empty. I was so happy to see Larry, so guilty about my little escapade with Edmond, that we had a great reunion.

Larry at Fort Campbell.

Larry was an armored cavalry officer, the 3rd Platoon leader for F Troop 17th Cavalry, 23rd Infantry Division (made famous by Lieutenant William Calley, who was at the center of the infamous My Lai Massacre). Larry didn’t mind spending his days inside a hot tank, but I
had such claustrophobia that I popped in and back out of it in ten seconds when he took me on a tour.

Life on an army base is insular, and the chain of command extends to the wives. I was an officer’s wife, albeit the lowest ranking officer, and I learned I was supposed to act like it. Officers got better everything—housing, food, all kinds of things—than the enlisted men. I knew no one, of course, but we were expected to go to parties for the officers whether we wanted to or not, and I had to go to teas and luncheons and events for the wives, which was fine, but I didn’t seem to meet anyone who was girlfriend material. At one of these first parties we were at the colonel’s house, standing outside beside a shimmery blue swimming pool, and a waiter in a white coat was passing around a tray of pretty juice drinks with fruit and little umbrellas stuck in them. It was a warm night and I was thirsty, so I took one, and it tasted pretty good. Nervous and trying to make conversation with the older officers, I drank it down quickly, and the waiter was right there on the spot and handed me a second. I was beginning to feel pretty relaxed for some reason and didn’t really want it, but took it to be gracious and sipped it.