My Mother Was Nuts (8 page)

I adjusted to college life easily. In letters home, I assured my mother that I was happy and busy. “I’ve been going out with mostly boys not in fraternities and the football players,” I wrote. “They’re real cool guys.” I stayed on campus for Thanksgiving and continued sending letters home. “I happen to have a lot of friends and am very well known in the school in regard to being from New York, my accent, which I haven’t lost, and also the way I dance—the Twist, not tap.”

In March 1962, I spent spring break in Los Angeles with my friend Sharon Martin, her boyfriend (and later husband) Clint Helton, and his younger brother, Del, who I liked. We visited Disneyland, went to the beach in Santa Monica, and spent time with my brother, who was writing for Joey Bishop and
The Lucy Show
and seemed to be doing well.

We stayed one night at his apartment in Hollywood, but the next day, after he had gone to work, the manager said we were making too much noise and asked us to leave. Mad, I threw a chair and a
chaise in the swimming pool. Later, the manager yelled at Garry, who apologized and said, “Yeah, my sister Penny is good at that kind of thing.”

Later that semester, I dated a freshman football player from Texas who called me “ma’am” and scared me with his politeness. I couldn’t understand his drawl, and he couldn’t understand my Bronx accent. We got along perfectly. But getting along with people was one of my talents. As a New Yorker, I was an outsider, and I was ignorant of a lot of the biases that the Southern boys possessed. At the dances, I usually partnered with black guys from the football team. They were the best dancers. It never dawned on me that some of their teammates might have had a problem with a white girl and a black guy dancing together.

But some did. One day I went into the student union and sat down on the team’s bench—it was called the “animal bench”—next to a couple of the black guys from the team. They were friends of mine. Ordinarily they would have shot the shit with me, but someone must have said something after the dance and so this time they said it wasn’t a good idea for me to sit with them anymore.

What?

I didn’t understand why. As I said, I was naïve.

“It’s not cool with the Texas boys,” one of them explained.

I dismissed their warning with a shake of my head. Screw that. Growing up, I had always been able to cross boundaries. I had gone into whatever neighborhood I wanted and played with whomever I wanted, and I wasn’t going to stop now. “I’m going to sit with you if I want to sit with you,” I said. “I don’t give a shit what the Texas boys think.”

And I didn’t.

My admirers included the football team’s captain, Chuck Cummings. We dated for several months. He had starred in the team’s biggest victory of the year, the 1961 Aviation Bowl Championship, in Dayton,
Ohio, and one night we were reliving some of those magic moments and creating a few of our own in the front seat of his car. Now, this is where life gets embarrassing. I thought that I’d already had sex, which shows how ignorant I was. If you think you’ve had sex but aren’t sure, you probably haven’t done it.

As it turned out, I hadn’t—until that night when I was making out with Chuck, and even then I wasn’t sure what was happening other than that this guy who weighed two hundred plus pounds was on top of me and I couldn’t push him off. Unsure what he was trying to do, I quit struggling and said, “Hey, if whatever you’re trying to do means that much to you, go ahead.”

It was after curfew when I walked back into my dorm and the tight-ass monitor immediately slapped me with twenty-eight “late” minutes. That pissed me off. Once upstairs, I changed clothes and discovered there was blood in my underwear. The next morning I called Chuck and yelled at him for making me start my period. He was quiet for a moment. He took a deep breath before explaining that he didn’t think I had started my period.

“No? I’m bleeding,” I said, annoyed.

“Penny, let me talk to you about what happened,” he said.

Like the good guy that he was, he came over and took me for a walk, and with more compassion and gentleness than you’d ever expect from a star football player, he explained the facts of life to me. This was the talk that I never got while growing up. I guess it says something about me that I didn’t just have sex with the captain of the football team. I learned about it from him, too.

Tragically, Chuck died in a car accident the next year. In his honor, the university created the annual Chuck Cummings Memorial Award for the most inspirational player. They still give it out. I also think it’s kind of cool that there’s a memorial to the first guy I did it with.

I know that I’ve never forgotten him.

Penny and Mickey Henry cutting the cake at their 1963 wedding in New Mexico
Anthony Marshall

T
OWARD THE END
of my sophomore year, I met Mickey Henry and I quit thinking about all the other boys I had been dating or wanted to date. A freshman, Mickey was in school on a football scholarship. An All-State end from Highland High, he was large and strong—exactly the type I liked—with short, dark hair and a puckish grin like a young Burt Reynolds. I came up to his shoulder and practically disappeared when he wrapped his arms around me.

You couldn’t find two more different people, though. Mickey and his two sisters had been raised by his grandmother. His mother worked at the local military base. His father had been in an institution since Mickey was a baby. If not for football, he wouldn’t have traveled outside of Albuquerque. He was shocked by the stories I told about my family and growing up in New York. If I didn’t amuse him, I confused him. Like when I tried to explain why my brother, sister, and I had all been confirmed different religions but were atheists.

Then summer came. I was a counselor for the second year in a row at Diana-Dalmaqua, a camp in the Catskills run by the parents of my mother’s dancing school favorite, Lois Rosenberg. Mickey
worked construction in Albuquerque. We kept in touch with letters and lengthy long-distance phone conversations.

When we returned to campus late that summer for what was my junior and his sophomore year, we picked up where we left off. We even discussed marriage in that dreamy, what-if way kids do when they’re in love for the first time. But I wasn’t in a rush, and Mickey said we needed to wait until after graduation when he would have a job and could start building a stable and solid future. I admired his self-control and common sense.

Then, one weekend early in the season, Mickey didn’t make the travel team and he sunk into a deep depression. I’m sure it was the first time in his sporting life that he had been left behind, and he didn’t know how to handle the setback. We went out the next night and in the process of consoling him, we ended up getting romantic in his car. I’d been in a front seat before, except this time I knew what I was doing.

Or so I thought—until I missed my period. I made an appointment with the campus doctor, who gave me a cursory exam and said I was stressed. I knew stress didn’t affect me that way, though. Without going into detail, I asked the doctor to give me a blood test. Even though the chance of me being pregnant from that one time was one in a million, I knew a baby was growing in me. And a few days later, the test results confirmed it.

For the first twenty-four hours, I was numb. All I could think about or hear in my head was my mother. She epitomized all my fears, frustrations, and sense of failure. I knew I was going to have to tell her, and before her, I had to tell Mickey. But before telling either of them, I wanted to think through my options, because maybe, just maybe, I might come up with a solution.

The most obvious option was to get an abortion in Juarez. I knew some girls who’d gone there. But I ruled it out immediately. Another option was to ride horses and push myself physically in an effort to
cause a miscarriage. I’d also heard stories about girls who’d gone that route, but I didn’t know if they were true, and I thought, with my luck, I’d botch the job and make a tough situation worse.

Still another option was to move to Amarillo and have the baby on my own. I don’t know why Amarillo. I’d never been there. It started with an “A.” It sounded far away. I had made my bed, and I would sleep in it—but out of town. I liked that scenario. I would be running away from Mickey and my mother, the two people I didn’t want to face.

Yet they were also the two people that I needed to tell. I don’t know why, but something about me would rather face the fire than torture myself, so I worked up my courage and broke the news to Mickey.

His reaction was much better than when he didn’t make the travel team. He listened to me run through the possible scenarios, and after I finished, he brought up another option—marriage.

“It’s mine, too,” he said. “We’ll get married.”

I had purposely avoided the M-word. Despite whatever Mickey and I had said in the past, I knew deep down that I wasn’t ready to get married, and I probably didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. But Mickey wrapped his strong arms around me and assured me that we were doing the right thing and would get through this together.

I called home, and my mother answered.

“I have news,” I said. “I’m getting married.”

“You’re pregnant,” she said.

It wasn’t even a question.

“No, I’m not,” I said reflexively.

“Yes, you are. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m not coming for the wedding. You’ll need me more when the baby is born.”

I suppose the conversation could have been worse.

My father was upset. He blamed Mickey and said he wanted to fly out and “kick that Indian’s teeth in.” Mickey was half Irish and
half Mexican, hence the slur. My father was 6’1”, but Mickey was 6’4”—and younger. I didn’t think any teeth would be kicked in. Daily phone calls helped everyone cool off. It was like we all went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Mickey and I set November 23 as our wedding date. We picked up a marriage license at city hall. They also gave us a marriage “starter kit”—a cardboard box containing Tide, a bar of soap, and a tube of toothpaste. My father flew into town on November 22, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. The news set a tone for the weekend.

On Saturday, after playing in a game against Brigham Young, Mickey changed into a suit and drove to his mother’s house, where the two of us were married in a simple and somber ceremony in the backyard. I wore a beige winter suit with a thick fur collar. My father had brought it from New York. I looked like an animal was swallowing me. I never wore it again.

Afterward, Mickey’s mother served cake and Kool-Aid. Then Mickey and I went to a motel, where we spent the rest of our honeymoon weekend watching President Kennedy’s funeral on TV.

Once married, we left our dorms and moved into an apartment near school. There was an avocado tree in the backyard, and I discovered that I liked them. So there was that. There was also an effort to make the best of the situation. My parents sent Mickey’s mother a letter expressing their appreciation for her watching out for me. They included a loaf of New York rye bread.

Mickey responded with a multipage thank-you, asking my parents to forgive me for not telling them sooner (“She was so upset that she had let you down.”) and assuring them that we were going to make it. “I want you to know that I do love Penny very much and will do my best to make her happy and provide for her every need,” he wrote. “Please don’t think I’m helpless or irresponsible. I
realize the overwhelming responsibility and pressure that I now have.”

Before Christmas, I found out that Mickey’s family members were Jehovah’s Witnesses. His sisters pushed me to go with them to the Kingdom Hall. I tried it once. The big joke there was “How do you tell Adam and Eve apart in Heaven?” The answer: “They don’t have bellybuttons.” I didn’t get it—and I didn’t go back.

As a Jehovah’s Witness, though, Mickey didn’t celebrate the holidays, so I took him to New York and we had Christmas with my family. It was his first time in the city. He was nervous but excited. My father showed him the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the other sights. They went by themselves. I didn’t do tourist attractions. I had seen them all in school.

But I did take Mickey to his first Broadway show. As we waited for the subway to take us downtown, I got nauseated. My morning sickness struck at night. Mickey turned away from me as I bent over the garbage can to throw up. I thought I detected some small-town embarrassment. “What?” I said. “This is New York. I’m not the first person to throw up in the subway.”

Back home, our lives changed. I realized why it takes nine months to have a baby. You need the time to adjust and prepare. Money became an issue. To cut expenses, we moved into Mickey’s mother’s house. It was shades of my own parents as I found myself living with his mother and grandmother. Mickey also sold his station wagon and got a job at night after school. Wanting to contribute, too, I dropped out of school midway through the year and signed up for office temp work as a Kelly Girl.