Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (28 page)

Olive Ann said that her parents' marriage was a great love story. She thought of
Time, Dirt, and Money
as a love story, too. The title came from a psychiatrist friend, who had once told her that the three things worriers worry about most are time, dirt, and money. “What about sex?” Olive Ann asked. No, her friend assured her, sex wasn't in the top three. The phrase captured Olive Ann's imagination, and she knew that she could create a character whose worries would threaten to deprive her of any real happiness. Will and Sanna would meet, be attracted to each other, and marry. But they would not be
in
love. True love would come to them years later, once they had learned to accept each other just as they were, for better or worse, and for all time. When we leave Will and Sanna at the end of Chapter 15 their life together is just beginning. However, the family history does shed some light on the challenges they were to face, and it provides a glimpse of their final reconciliation. It is also a fascinating document in its own right; it reveals how Olive Ann drew on real life to write her fiction. Here, for example, are Ruby Burns's memories of meeting her future husband, from which Olive Ann created Chapter 1 of
Time, Dirt, and Money:

 

I met Arnold at a watermelon cutting in the park. The school board gave the party for the teachers, and a lot of young men came because there were a lot of new teachers. Arnold was working in Athens and brought several friends with him from the college. There were quite a lot of attractive young men there that day. I was impressed with Arnold Burns, but not overly. I didn't think he was exactly handsome, he was so skinny. He just weighed 135. But I knew I liked him. The next Sunday he asked me for a date and I had a date with him every Sunday from then till summer, when he went to the Army. He had a motorcycle when I first met him, but he always used his father's car for dates and I never remember having a date with him by myself. He always filled up the car. He wasn't too good at talking in those days—I mean saying sweet things or handing out a line. Arnold was good at
DOING
. I mean he showed me how he felt, by wanting to be with me.

 

That's Will Tweedy, all right, but only Olive Ann could bring him to life. Her notes for the novel make it clear that Ruby Burns's struggles were to provide some of the book's major themes—namely, Sanna's lifelong search for a sense of belonging, and her need for constant reassurance that she came first in her husband's heart.

Ruby Burns told Olive Ann that she didn't let Arnold kiss her until the day she told him she would marry him. “She always said she thought part of what kept Arnold after her was being hard to get,” Olive Ann wrote in the family history. “He was so popular and attractive that girls had always fallen for him and he wasn't used to anybody as feisty and independent as she was.”

If Ruby was feisty and independent, it was because she had been forced to be. Her life had been shaped by her father's early death and by her mother's rejection of her. “Ruby's father got sick when she was eight,” Olive Ann wrote, “and after that nothing was ever right again...From then on she always expected the worst to happen, not the best.” Sanna's childhood was based on Ruby's as Olive Ann had recorded it. “When Ruby was ten,” she wrote in the family history, “Sister Ollie and Brother Ed invited her to stay with them in Greensboro so she could go to a better school. This made a good education possible for her, yet it was the beginning of an isolation complex from which she still suffered as an adult. To belong somewhere became an obsession. Her education cost her a mother, for she never again felt that Mama was interested even.”

Olive Ann had grown up hearing about the unloved little girl who was given just a dollar for Christmas while her six-year-old sister received a diamond ring; whose mother hadn't attended her high school graduation or her wedding. “I went to see my mother when school was out,” Ruby told Olive Ann, “and showed her my engagement ring and she didn't say anything. She just looked at it. Arnold and I were married on the eighth of September at Sister Ollie's house. Mama didn't come to the wedding.” Olive Ann found it hard to believe that any mother could reject a daughter like this. Such experiences went a long way toward explaining Ruby's bouts of moodiness and anxiety, and the sometimes unreasonable demands she made on those around her. In creating Sanna, Olive Ann tried to see the world as her mother had seen it. Soon after she returned from the Hambidge Center, she sent me a photograph of her mother, taken when she was a dark-haired young beauty with large, sad eyes. “This is Sanna,” Olive Ann wrote.

Olive Ann describes Sanna as “a perfectionist and a worrier.” She is obsessed with the idea of finding happiness, and for her, as Olive Ann wrote in her notes for the novel, “happiness means being first with somebody, having her own home, being loved by a perfect man and perfect, loving children.” Much of the dramatic tension was to come from the difference between Will and Sanna, each wanting such different things from their marriage. Rejected by her mother, Sanna spends the rest of her life seeking love and acceptance. “The theme of Sanna is disillusionment,” Olive Ann wrote. “Her life is the pursuit of happiness and perfection, but she finds happiness and perfection impossible to obtain—her idea of happiness is constant joy, no changes.”

By contrast, “Will's idea of life is to be challenged. [He] loves trying anything new, loves change—is impatient with Sanna—living is a matter of making things work if you can....In fact, the harder things are, the more he is excited and challenged.”

Ten days before their wedding, Arnold Burns sent Ruby Celestia Hight a diamond engagement ring. Olive Ann wrote in the family history, “All her life she treasured the fact that it was a perfect stone. Then perhaps five years before she died the jeweler who cleaned it said it had a crack—he said a diamond can survive all manner of licks and then get hit just the right way, maybe on a sink, and crack like that. It was a great blow to Ruby, who treasured perfection. But to me—I wear it now—it is a symbol that a marriage that was a victim of the Depression, and the fact that these two, so in love in the beginning and so in love in the end, with so many troubles in between and personalities so opposite—it's a symbol that an imperfect marriage can still survive and be good, and much good can come out of it. And if any grandchildren or great-grandchildren reading this has a cracked marriage and is thinking of divorce, remember Ruby and Arnold and try harder before you give up.”

The Depression nearly crushed the fragile bond between Arnold and Ruby; he had to struggle just to keep food on the table, and Ruby yearned for romance and affection. Her dreams of perfect married life were replaced by a reality that included four rambunctious children, piles of unpaid bills, cramped rented rooms, and a husband who was away from home five nights a week. Olive Ann remembered those years all too well; she had sympathized with both her parents. Her notes for the novel show that Will, like her father, was stretched too thin, trying to help his parents, to earn a living, and to be a good husband and father. But Sanna wants all of him. Olive Ann intended to show “Sanna caught in another situation where she feels second, except with the children. She centers her life in them. So does Will, so this is their togetherness. Their separateness comes from his being pulled between his family and Sanna, and from conflicts over money.”

At one point, trying to explain her unhappiness, Sanna was to say to Miss Love, “I read some psychology books in college. Everything that's supposed to warp a child happened to me.” Miss Love, who had been raped as an adolescent, replies, “Everything that could warp a child happened to me, too. But understanding that doesn't help. It's interesting but it doesn't help. I figure that what you do with your life now is all that counts. I try not to look back.”

This is Will's philosophy, too. Much as he loves Sanna, he can't understand her constant brooding, and he cannot bear the feeling that no matter what he does, he can never meet her expectations. Olive Ann knew how hard her own father had tried to make her mother happy, and she saw the disappointment on both sides. In the family history, she transcribed a 1943 letter that Arnold had written to Ruby from a hotel in Alabama, where he was working for a cotton cooperative. “Dearest Ruby,” it began, “so tomorrow's your birthday and the night when you took me for better or worse 25 years ago. Well, I guess it's been worse for you, but if I had it all to go thru again my pick of all the women would be the same. You have been a wonderful mother and a very patient woman to put up with me. You could probably have done much better, as your life with me has been one continued hardship. About the only good thing I can think of, is you have never actually gone hungry, even tho for six months your only meat was rabbit. I am enclosing a little plain ring. [Olive Ann added: “Her original wedding band wore so thin it broke. For years she had only had the engagement ring and looked divorced.”] It's not what I wanted for you,” Arnold apologized; “it should be filled with diamonds and made of the finest platinum, but with so much to buy and the war on I'll have to put off just what I wanted to get you until later. You have four diamonds around you and after seeing other people's children I am satisfied they are the finest in the world. You deserve all the credit. I'll be thinking of you tomorrow and Wednesday, and of the vow I took 25 years ago, ‘Until death do us part,' and I'll make the same vow again.”

Ruby and Arnold did indeed stay together until death intervened, but they were sorely tested. Olive Ann had figured out how she would test Will and Sanna, too, from the influenza epidemic of 1918 to the grinding poverty of the Depression. She also knew that she would take Will and Sanna to the brink of divorce.

In her notes for the novel, Olive Ann refers to two women who were to enter Will's life at a time when his foundering marriage had made him particularly vulnerable. One of them is his college love, Trulu Philpot, who is living nearby, unhappily married, with no money. Although Will assures Sanna that their affair means nothing, that it was only bad judgment on his part, Sanna is devastated. “Sanna finds out,” Olive Ann writes in her notes, “breaks it up, decides divorce is better than living like that.” In time, though, Sanna informs Will that if he gives his word that the affair is over, she will stay with him, having concluded that she will probably be “happier in an imperfect marriage than most divorcees are.”

Ruby Burns had come to the same conclusion. In the family history, Olive Ann recalls an extraordinary afternoon she spent with her mother shortly before her death. One of Ruby's grandchildren was there, with a young friend, and everyone was sitting around the dining room table. Ruby said that she wished young people wouldn't give up so easily. “There was a time when your granddaddy and I just couldn't get along,” she admitted. “It was as much my fault as his, and it started with the Depression. Before that, nobody could have been happier than we were. Plenty of things happened that I resented, and I'm sure he didn't like everything I did, but we were so in love it didn't affect our relationship. But then we lost everything we had and his father went bankrupt—you see, in his family there had always been money, and the family pride was based on what they had as well as their prominence in the life of the town....To lose everything humiliated Arnold. We owed everybody in Commerce when we left,
MONEY
became the cross of our lives. When he was upset over bills he fussed at me and I fussed back, until finally I lost my spirit.”

Ruby believed that Arnold would be better off with a different kind of person. “I told him that we had to either change or separate,” she said, “and that's when he made his decision. He didn't become an angel overnight and he's still not an easy person to live with, and I'm certainly not easy for him to live with. We are just as different as we ever were. I'm such an awful perfectionist, and he really doesn't care whether a job is perfect or not, just so it's done. He still is totally concentrated on whatever he's busy at, whether it's a drive to sell more debentures at the office or getting ready for a fishing trip, so that I still don't get the attention I need to really feel secure. But when I have needed him most, since I've been sick, it is me he has been concentrated on.”

Olive Ann was moved by her mother's reflections, and she never forgot that afternoon; it prompted her to look at her parents' marriage in a new light, and to feel that the pain they had endured had not been for nothing. Not only had they survived it, but, toward the end of their lives, they rediscovered the best in each other and fell in love all over again.

According to Olive Ann, Ruby finished telling her story “with the most beautiful glow on her face.” At last, she felt the love and security she had been seeking all her life. “So I've gone from thinking I couldn't possibly keep living with him to knowing, now, that he is the one thing I don't want to live without—can't live without. He is my whole reason for living. He always has been, of course. I've never stopped being in love with him. When he would be sweet and affectionate to me the whole world seemed mine. When he ignored me or was irritable I was shattered. That's why it mattered so much. I couldn't ignore him. So don't give up too quickly when you marry and things aren't right. I wish long ago I could have accepted your granddaddy as he is, not as I wanted him to be. I might have made him happier too. I was not the person he needed, I know that, but I thank God we have lived long enough to love each other again.”

Arnold felt the same way. He had never stopped loving Ruby, and when he finally realized that she felt her life had become intolerable, he did everything in his power to win her back. He tried to find ways to show her, every day, that he was thinking of her, that her happiness was the most important thing in the world to him. When he was sixty-two, he wrote her, “I am looking forward now, not to 63 or 64 but to 65. Then I'll quit this job and fish and piddle and sit and watch you. You are just as sweet, pretty, and lovable as you were in 1918...I don't know of one thing I would want changed in my life and the only thing in yours I would change would be from a pessimist sometimes to an optimist. Just think, if it's raining today, the sun will be shining tomorrow, and just remember that I'll be loving you every day until that day when there's no tomorrow for either of us.”