Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (9 page)

Afterward, our priest and his wife opened their home for Sunday eucharist. Very soon the congregation purchased a house and a lot on a busier, well-traveled street. Services were held in that house until a beautiful A-frame church was built.

We joined the Atlanta Country Club, which had a challenging nine-hole course. At that point, any course would have been challenging to me. Never having played, I was taking lessons and receiving lots of advice from everyone with whom we golfed. It didn’t take long for us to make new friends and get involved in lots of club activities—golf tournaments, dances, and barbecue.

B. and I lived in an apartment and later found a small house for rent. As always, when I went out job hunting I had no trouble finding secretarial positions. I started with the Southwestern Electric Power Company, later worked as a legal secretary, and then got a job with a local glove manufacturing company.

El flew up for Easter vacation, and we had a great visit. We toured the high school and were both impressed with what we saw and heard. We played tennis on the local public courts in a lovely, tree-shaded park. Being together again was wonderful, and I looked forward to her coming back for good as soon as her school year was over.

I was sure the change would be as welcome to Ellen as it was to me. And, again, I was eager to get her to this small friendly town (very Baptist and very dry), away from the bad influence of her fast crowd in the big city. We drove down to New Orleans in June and came back with Ellen and all her belongings. She, too, made friends right away. As for protecting her from the bad influence of her friends in Metairie, here was what Ellen said later (November 9, 1993) in an interview with
Gambit
, a New Orleans weekly:

Of course, I didn’t know anything about those bonfire and beer sessions. At first, I also didn’t know that Ellen felt out of place in Atlanta. She seemed to adjust right away.

Everyone who met Ellen was immediately impressed by her. That’s what I heard from a friend I met at the high school track, just behind the house we were renting, where we used to walk and jog. This was Paul Garfield, a marathon runner, about my age, who had moved with his family to Atlanta from Boston. Paul told me how Ellen used to jog with him and talk the whole time and not even be winded. He, on the other hand, had all he could do just to answer and keep running.

The Garfields were one of two Jewish families in all of Atlanta, Texas. I recall finding out, after the fact, that their kids had to endure a couple of anti-Semitic incidents at school. Clearly this town was not one to easily embrace diversity. Nor was it a place where a teenager like Ellen might easily come to terms with her sexuality.

When El started high school in the fall, her junior year, she was very popular. Naturally—she was the new girl in town, and there weren’t too many of those. But although she was well-liked, the only joining she did was to play on the high school tennis team. Football was very big; the whole town went to see the Atlanta Rabbits on Friday nights. The high school girls were either in the band, cheerleading, or in the Maroon Jackets—a pep squad. Ellen chose none of the above, and perhaps she marched to a different drummer from then on.

When we moved to East Texas, El went through a sudden weight gain. She had been a rather tall, skinny little girl, but all that changed in Atlanta. Ellen’s tendency to put on a few extra pounds during times of stress would continue until her coming out episode in 1997. It was only then, with her newfound liberation, that her extra weight dropped away from her effortlessly. Amazing.

In high school, El had the usual dates and boyfriends. Yes, one beau did put her name in iridescent letters on the back of his pickup, “right above the gun rack,” as Ellen would later quip. In her senior year, there was even a promise ring with a tiny diamond chip from a nice-looking boy. They went steady for several months. Then there was the time a couple who were dating arranged a blind date for her. Ellen was all dressed and ready to go when there was a knock at the door. She opened the door and saw the boy standing there.

He said, “Ellen?”

And she pointed down the block, saying, “No, she lives two houses over.”

After he went back to the car, the other couple assured him that he had the right house. So back he came. This time, laughing sheepishly, she went with him. More glimmers.

N
OT LONG AFTER
we had settled into our rented house, we found a house for sale that, fortunately, we could afford. Unfortunately, the reason we could afford it was that it had been half destroyed in a fire. But we bought it anyway and rebuilt it from top to bottom. Ellen and I cleaned off bricks and nailed decking and rolled tarpaper on the roof. The three of us did everything ourselves, backbreaking work after our jobs and on weekends.

One of the things that appealed to me about B., I thought, was how handy he was. He was a real take-charge guy, sometimes too much in charge. In fact, on some days B.’s main contribution to the work was to direct traffic. Friends stopped by one day while I was precariously perched on the roof, nailing down tar paper over knotholes to keep the rain out, while my husband was safe and secure inside the house, shouting orders. Our friends looked at me quizzically—what’s wrong with this picture?—but I shrugged it off.

B.’s take-charge approach with Ellen was not so easy to shrug off. Ellen was used to her father, who was so kind and gentle that he was absolutely permissive. B. was bossy. Not all the time, but there were a couple of instances of his stepping in and insisting that she do something his way. This was not the positive exposure to discipline that I’d hoped for; instead, he came across as harsh and mean-spirited.

There was one incident when B. became very unhappy with the way Ellen was cleaning an old toilet in the house. I heard them disagreeing just at the point that he was showing her how to do it. “Like this,” he said gruffly, putting his hand down in it and scrubbing. “Put some elbow grease in it. Do it right, if you’re gonna do it.”

El glared and said nothing, absolutely refusing to put her hand into a toilet.

He started to yell; she started to cry. I stepped in and managed to defuse the situation, saying that I wouldn’t do it either. Ellen wiped her tears, but I could see the conflict in her lace. On the one hand, she was furious with the man I had chosen to be my husband; on the other hand, she loved me and wanted me to be happy with him.

And there I was, in the middle, trying to placate the two of them. Even though my instincts told me the problem wasn’t going to go away, I did manage, again, to shrug it off—for the time being.

J
UST BEFORE MY
remarriage and my move to East Texas, I’d had a complete physical to be sure I was in good shape. And, so far as we knew, I was. However, in early 1975 I discovered a small lump in my right breast. A doctor friend of ours in Atlanta referred me to a physician-surgeon in Texarkana, Texas, a larger town just twenty-five miles away. I liked Dr. Dawson very much, and I liked the fact that he was conservative. He wanted to wait and see if the lump changed or went away at different times of the month.

Then, during a visit to New Orleans, I went back to my gynecologist, Dr. Bradburn, who had delivered Vance and Ellen. He ordered a thermography test and had the results sent to Dr. Dawson. The consensus was that this was a benign mass. A biopsy was scheduled for March 26, 1975, at Wadley Hospital in Texarkana. Early that morning, as I left the house with B., Ellen followed us, pleading with me to let her come to the hospital with us.

“El,” I reassured her with a hug, “it’s only for a biopsy. The doctor feels certain it’s benign. You don’t need to miss school for this. I’ll be home this evening.”

Late in the day, I awoke from the anesthesia with one breast removed. My right chest was completely bandaged. A modified radical mastectomy had been performed. In those first hours and days, I vacillated among many emotions—horror, shock, fear, anger, disappointment. How could this have been done to me? Because, I was told, while I was anesthetized my husband had given permission for the procedure. A part of me recognized that he made that decision with my best interests at heart; emotionally, however, I felt totally betrayed to not have been consulted.

Years later I sent for a copy of the four-page medical record of my operation. In it, Dr. Dawson stated his procedure for the biopsy and then said, “To our surprise and chagrin the report was malignant disease.” I appreciated his concern and care, but no one was more surprised and chagrined than I was. Because of my background in Christian Science, I was woefully ignorant of all things medical. That was bad enough. The fact that I was not given any advance preparation felt like an even greater violation.

Though I had persuaded Ellen not to come the first day, she was there with me constantly the next two days. B. was in and out, but El hardly left my side. We had seen each other through a lot of loss already. But this was different. We had no experience whatsoever with illness. Now there was the horrifying specter of cancer. Just as horrible, she had to see me in a hospital—something completely foreign to both of us. To see me lying in that bed, dejected and shocked, must have been terrifying for Ellen. And yet she remained strong and calm, attending to my every need. Only much later would she break down and say, “When you had that operation, I could have died.”

When the doctor said I could go down the hall and actually enjoy a bath, it was El who helped me in and out of the tub and sat by me, worrying that I was in pain.

El wasn’t present, thankfully, when the doctor came in to remove the bandage. I was horrified to see what a complete job had been done. I don’t know what I had expected, but I cried, “You didn’t even leave the nipple!” I believe that today a lumpectomy would have been done. At that time, it wasn’t so common.

Dr. Dawson explained calmly, “This was the safest way to go—to be sure we got it all.” Otherwise, he said, if there were any cancer cells left, they could turn up anywhere else in the body.

I was sure that my womanhood, as I knew it, was over. B. and I were still newlyweds, and all my dormant sensuality had been reawakened with him. Now I worried that he would be repulsed by my appearance. Later that day, with Ellen and B. in the room, I blurted out to him, “You can have a divorce if you want one.”

His response? He shrugged, muttering, “Aw, hell, I don’t care. As long as I can still turn you on in other places.” That was B.’s poorly worded attempt to reassure me. It wouldn’t have been so offensive if Ellen hadn’t been sitting right next to me.

Stony-faced, she said nothing. Later, she told me that she was the one who was repulsed—by his crudeness and insensitivity.

As devastated as I was, I made up my mind to do everything in my power not to be victimized by what had happened to me. And I think I adjusted quickly and well, though B. was really clueless about how to offer emotional support. Even less helpful were his occasional comments, through the years, that the lump probably hadn’t been malignant. That was what finally motivated me, after many years, to send for the medical report.

B.’s lack of support to some extent was my own fault. I had scheduled what was supposed to have been just a biopsy over the three-day Easter weekend and had planned on going right back to work, but when things went differently I should have changed my plans and stayed home longer to recuperate. Instead, I did my normal “I can handle it” routine: came home from the hospital on Monday, stayed in bed on Tuesday, and went back to work on Wednesday, with cut-up panty hose in my bra. That in itself was awful. No one had told me about a prosthesis or anything special to wear. Only later, during a trip to Dallas after a saleswoman in a lingerie department had made the suggestion, was I fitted for a prosthesis.

At that time and in that place, there was no informative visit while I was in the hospital and no support group for me to join to cope with this loss.

I wasn’t able to move my arm very much at first, so when I was at work, from time to time I would go to a doorway in the back of the office and practice walking my fingers up the door frame until eventually I could get shoulder-high. Besides golf and jogging, for several years I had been doing yoga. So when I could once again swing a golf club and once again do a headstand, I really felt I was all the way back. Those pursuits, my usual handiwork projects, a budding interest in calligraphy (which I later taught), night classes to complete my bachelor’s degree at East Texas State College in Texarkana and, of course, my secretarial job—all these kept me busy and involved.

Then there was the completion of our house. Painstaking and slow though it was, once it was done the house was really a lovely home. Perhaps I cherished it especially because so much of our joint labor had gone into it. After we finally moved in, I threw myself into cooking, entertaining friends, and caring for our very own home—a regular Martha Stewart before any of us had ever heard of her.

Besides Ellen’s unbelievably wonderful support in the wake of my mastectomy, I received loving letters and calls from Mother—Noni, as the kids called her—and Helen and her gang in Pass Christian, as well as Audrey and Bob and the girls, who were living now in Baytown, Texas, just east of Houston. I believe that the art of letter-writing was not lost on any of the Pfeffer women, and these were years in which my sisters and I became much closer in spite of our geographical distance.