Similarly, Grandma—Dad’s mom—told me a woman should never have her own income. It would “spoil” her, make her too independent. Ironically, Grandma managed a two-thousand-acre ranch after husbands one and two died and left her to raise my dad, three stepkids, and a niece. By herself. She was the most cussedly independent and powerful woman I knew.
For me, there would be no “marriage versus career” choice. I intended to have both. And I didn’t need a husband to “take care of me.” My starting salary at Glendale High would be $4,800 a year, and Terry would make $4,500 at the News. So what?
Mom and Dad had aspirations for their only daughter to “marry well.” Someone tall. Handsome. Educated. Someone who could support me. A man on his way up.
I was a dutiful girl. I didn’t want to disappoint, except for one small detail. We were haggling, in our oblique ways, over the rest of my life, not a hunk of meat. My decision had to be more than skin deep, measured by more than the number of inches to the floor, more than a checklist of the “right stuff.” Who was out of step with whom? Was I wrongheaded? Or were they?
Given that I loved both men, it was about the best match of our goals and values. And the wrenching decision of what path I would choose for my own future.
19
A Decision at Last
Ann
Thursday, September 3, 1964, Glendale. Terry bounced into La Cocina Café like Tigger on catnip. He dropped the first fresh-off-the-press “Terry issue” of the Glendale News on the table. I scrutinized all eight pages, one by one. “So where are your bylines?”
“No bylines this week. No lurid exposés, no breaking news, all piddly stuff.”
“Okay, let’s see. You did the lead story on next week’s election, right?”
“Yep.”
“And the high school and college news? Building permits? Foiled teenaged burglars? Miss Mexican Fiesta royalty? And the installation ceremony for the new postmaster? What a scoop! How about the editorial ‘Auto Drivers: A Dying Race’?”
“Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep—and nope. You won’t catch me writing a cotton-candy editorial like that. I have plenty to say about drunk driving, but this isn’t it.”
I read the conclusion aloud: “‘So we think the millions of words will be wasted—like these we’ve written,’” I mocked in my best sing-song. “‘Good drivers will pay attention. Poor drivers will go on being poor drivers.’” I snorted and tossed it aside. “Worse than cotton candy. It’s a permit to drive drunk. They shoulda asked you.”
“No kidding. Never mind. I’ll save my fire for the future.”
“You wrote all of page one! What’d they do ‘before Terry’? They paying you enough?”
“Enough for what? Where else could you interview the key politicians, the police chief, the gorgeous Miss Mexican Fiesta, and, yes, the postmaster? All in the first three days on the job. Plus, get paid to do it.”
“Hey, you even squeezed my name into the Glendale High new-hires story. How embarrassing.” I skimmed the rest. Twenty articles in his first week, the majority of the newspaper. What a talent.
Over my first-ever quesadilla at La Cocina, I prattled on about my orientation at school, my new colleagues, the principal. We didn’t run down until after nine. “I gotta go, Ter,” I told him. “Another long day of orientation tomorrow—can’t afford to fall asleep.”
“Stay a while longer? Better yet, let’s adjourn to your place?”
His eyes were puppy hopeful, but I was beat. Besides, I had to digest the thick binder of school rules and policies we’d been given as “homework”—pages and pages on attendance, tardies, discipline, grades, lesson plans, reports, and deadlines.
He walked me to my car, tried to kiss me good night under the street-light—right there in downtown Glendale. Not this again! “Hey, let’s save that for private.”
“Jeez, Annie. Don’t be so uptight.”
“This is diff—” Too late. His lips had drawn into a line, and his left eyebrow dropped into a scowl. “Sorry, guy,” I said to his back. “See you tomorrow?”
He tossed a surly “Sure!” over his shoulder and disappeared around the corner.
Managing Terry around my job was going to be a challenge. Visions of student gossip cavorted through my mind: Did you see Miss Garretson necking with that guy from the newspaper? ¡Eeeeejole, hombre! It would undermine my authority. Ugh. I sounded like Mom.
I was still tormenting mental worry beads when I picked up my mail—advertisements, flyers, and two letters. One from Jack. The other from Terry, sent to Albuquerque, forwarded by Mom. Wow, seven neatly typed pages from Terry, dated August 29. And six handwritten pages from Jack, dated September 1. Both error-free. How did they manage to lay their thoughts on paper so perfectly? I always second-guessed my own wording, backed up, crossed out, started over. I skipped to the last page of Terry’s letter:
Regardless of what happens to this relationship of ours—whether you decide to marry me or not—I will have gained a new, important outlook, which is far greater than either of us. This, of course, is aside from the great personal gains I have had because of being loved and being able to love.
Let me hastily add that this in no way decreases my desire for marriage, or alters my inability to see any other life but one with you. I want you now more than ever before, but I want you now so that you too can find and share with me what I have found. I hope, then, that you will soon reach the same conclusion.
Oh my, another Terry heart-grabber. I flipped back to the beginning. He bewitched me with descriptions of sunset and nighttime in the desert: “The clouds turn purple, then black, and with the red shining through and around them, they become grotesque, unknown forms guarding the sinking sun. Hundreds of bugs and beetles hum and croak and sing and twitter in the darkness.” I wanted to be there beside him.
I turned to page two:
I have grown to want to make love to you very much. Nothing excites me more than seeing your pale, white breasts against your lightly tanned body, or feeling again the softness of a woman. I have wanted you for a long time, of course, but before this summer, it wouldn’t have been right. Only when you blushingly told me you wondered what making love with me would be like did I know that you were ready for lovemaking.
Not again! He launched into two pages on having sex with me, even more explicit than his letter from San Francisco. After that, a four-page monologue on love—based on Martin Luther King Jr.’s essay in Stride Toward Freedom on eros, philia, and agape. I loved that about Terry, always reading, thinking. But the sex was too much. He was obsessed with it. Back off, Ter!
The letter smoldered. I pushed it away, but not before an image from my high school days threw me into a stinging sweat. My senior year, my boyfriend had declared, “I love you.” I was aghast. I liked him a lot, but I was too young to be in love. I wrote him a two-page letter explaining why I couldn’t say “I love you” back. I planned to give it to him on our next date, but changed my mind—better to tell him face-to-face. Not wanting anyone to read it, I tore the letter into a mound of confetti and threw it all into my wastebasket. When I got home that night, Mom was asleep on my bed, something she occasionally did so she would know I had gotten home safely. In the semidarkness, I saw it: My confetti reassembled on the carpet, like a puzzle.
Now this letter from Terry sent through Albuquerque. Oh no! Mom didn’t steam it open, did she? I examined the envelope. No signs of illegal entry, but that didn’t quell my raging anxiety.
I laid Terry’s scorcher aside and turned to Jack’s letter. It started out chatty, about Terry not leaving for the Peace Corps and the value of volunteers bringing international awareness back to the United States. He said he would join if he were a civilian. At the top of the last page:
But on the other aspect of Terry’s staying, the rival side, well, no man could ask for a better opportunity to throw out his complete line than I had on our European tour. So if my impression was not sufficient to last over time and distan
ce, then it was not of the proper sort in the first place. C’est la vie.
“C’est la vie”? Something deep inside stung, exploding the sparkly dream I’d nurtured for two years. It was an ominous depth charge signaling an end: f-f-f-f-thud. “C’est la vie”? Just like that? Where was his passion? Not sufficient to last? He didn’t believe that. Why would he say it? To hurt me? Well, it did, Lieutenant. It did.
I read on. “Now that you’ve bought a car, I’ll have to find somebody else to keep the Sting Ray while I’m at war.” He signed off, “Miss you. Love, Jack.” Overall, his letter reflected the warm current that had connected us. I was sure he loved me, deep down, but he was marching off to war—no we in that declaration. Did I say or do anything on our trip that sent him there? Could I have done anything to make it different? If we had decided to marry, would he still have put in for duty in Vietnam?
Two letters, so opposite, each infuriating in its own way. Terry, sex-crazed and bombastic, crashing into the most private of acts by putting it on paper. And Jack. So defeatist. Preoccupied with war. Unable to think straight about us, about what we’d shared. But “c’est la vie”?
Those pesky thoughts doomed me to a sleepless night—until I hit on a solution: I didn’t have to marry either one, not immediately, not until I was sure what I wanted.
It couldn’t be right for them—either of them—until it was right for me.
Sunday morning, September 6, 1964, Glendale. My focus was so clear. I couldn’t marry Terry or Jack. Not right away. I had to tell them, but how could I carry it off without hurting either of them?
I started with a letter to Jack—a trial run—writing was easier than stuttering things out face-to-face with Terry. Still, my letter was awkward. After Johnstown, I wasn’t sure he actually wanted to marry me. But I couldn’t leave things up in the air. I told him I couldn’t marry anyone right now (so he would know it included Terry), because my first priority had to be my teaching. I couldn’t be worrying about planning a wedding or learning how to be a wife or fearing an inevitable call to duty from the army.
Then I had to face Terry. By midafternoon, I was pacing my living room—long before he picked me up for dinner, jittery as a fourteen-year-old on a first date.
At La Cocina, Terry went on about the upcoming week’s stories, his plans for turning the News into a “real” newspaper. All I could muster was the occasional “uh-huh” until he stopped midsentence and cocked his head. “You’re too quiet. What’s up?”
I finished chewing the last bite of my quesadilla. “Ter, I can’t do it, not right now,” I told him—gently, lovingly, but emphatically. “I’m simply not ready to marry anybody.”
Instantly, he clammed up, a gloomy replay of Jack as stone statue in Landshut, when I first told him about my feelings for Terry. “I don’t mean forever,” I said. “I need time on my own so I can be sure, that’s all.”
His eyes clouded over and then glistened. “Let’s get out of here.” He paid the bill. Dropped me off like a hitchhiker. Didn’t open the car door. Didn’t say good night. Didn’t walk me in.
Now what? He had to understand my decision. Love wasn’t the issue. I did love him. I simply wasn’t ready to marry. Europe had taught me that. While I had loved the time with Jack, I also took pleasure in (and was amazed by) what I did by myself. I didn’t need to depend on my family or a husband.
Terry
Sunday night, 6 September, 1964, Glendale. My mind was reeling. She turned me down. We were talking, chatting like normal. She went silent. Then bam. “No, Ter, I can’t.”
Was it Jack? I didn’t know. She didn’t mention him. She did say “your military views” and “I need to be on my own.” I couldn’t remember what else. It didn’t matter, the exact words. It was over. Right there in La Cocina, halfway through a burrito. Our first week together in Glendale, and it was over.
What the hell was I going to do now? In Glendale, Arizona. Alone.
Ann
Labor Day, September 7, 1964, Glendale. On my last day to plan for my first week of teaching, I tried to be super-organized—not a strong suit for me. With three classes of regular senior English and two “decelerated” classes, I’d have to scramble to keep up. As a first-year teacher, I had no reservoir of lesson plans, no notebook full of tips and tricks, no experience. I’d have to create each day’s lessons on a blank slate. To top it off, Glendale High was growing so fast I didn’t have my own classroom. I’d have to troop from room to room, lugging my materials with me. I refined my first day’s lesson plans over breakfast.
But I couldn’t concentrate. Pulsing images of Terry and Jack sailed past, tugging, pulling, pleading, scolding, offering up fond memories and tempting pleasures.
And now, I was paralyzed by a new fear. Marriage was forever. How could I possibly know whether I would love either of them forever? That I wouldn’t change or they wouldn’t?
And finally, I feared disappointing Mom and Dad. But I resented the pressure from all sides. From Mom and Dad not to marry Terry. From Terry to marry—now—and dive immediately into bed. From Jack, who, though now distant, circled overhead like a hawk waiting for an opportunity to swoop in.
What was I to do?
Terry
Monday, 7 September 1964, Glendale. I awoke a stranger in a foreign land, an orphan abandoned in the desert. Last night, she dumped me. My Peace Corps dreams were dashed. Hopes for marriage squelched. Friends nonexistent.
At least I had a job. Or I would until the draft board caught up with me.
But no time to mope. Deadlines loomed. I ran a hose from the coffee pot to my bottomless cup and pounded out one story after another—bios of the eight candidates from Glendale who were running for statewide offices in the primary election, plans for a new junior college in Glendale, a burglary, a new well in a local park. Every article would run on page one. Lunch? A peanut butter sandwich at my desk. At night I collapsed, too tired to fret over former girlfriends and their twisted logic.
That got me through Monday. Then came Tuesday. And Wednesday.
After we put the News to bed Wednesday night, I trooped with the rest of the staff over to La Cocina for their ritual post-production quesadillas and Dos Equis celebration. By bedtime, I was too loop-legged for anything but instant sleep.
Thursdays at the News were a midweek respite, as relaxed as Sunday mornings. I rolled into work at nine-thirty. Turned on the lights and made the coffee. Read a few press releases. Thumbed the Arizona Republic. Somewhere between the front-page news that President Johnson had ordered the FBI to probe the nation’s string of recent race riots and the devastation caused by Hurricane Dora, I realized that Annie hadn’t said, “I don’t love you,” or “No, Terry, I’ll never marry you.” She’d said, “I’m not ready, Terry, I’m just not.”
That slow-to-come insight got me through the first week.
Tuesday, 15 September 1964, Glendale. Nine days since I’d seen Annie. Nine days since she’d destroyed my future. Before the school year started, both of us had signed up for a class on the Arizona State Constitution at the local community college—she because it was required for teachers new to Arizona, and I because it would help me cover local and state politics. It didn’t make sense to drive there separately, so I worked up the courage to call her.
Not a simple call, though. No “hi, howdy” would do. With Annie you had to open with a puzzler or something that would make her laugh.
“Hi,” I said. “Happy anniversary!”
A long silence. “Terry? Is that you? And whose anniversary might that be?”
“Darwin’s—1835. On this day the HMS Beagle dropped anchor in the Galapagos.”
Silence again, and then, “Dang. It slipped my mind. Meant to bake a cake.”
“Never mind. How about we celebrate? Can I buy you a drink?”
Another pause. “Deal.”
We met for Cokes after school at La Cocina and circled like boxers in a rematch, tossing around softball tidbits from our new li
ves. As our initial awkwardness dissolved into normal banter, I ventured, “Do you want to carpool to the Arizona Constitution class tonight?”
“Of course,” she said. “It would be crazy to drive two cars downtown.”
An awkward half hour, but at least we talked. Even laughed once or twice. I paid. Twenty cents. It was a start, and it gave us a reason to see each other at least once a week.
Early Fall 1964, Glendale. My promised five-day-a-week job quickly burgeoned to six, then seven. I filled my days and nights with work. I didn’t date. I didn’t have time. Besides, as for girls, all I wanted was to win Annie back. My night life? Other than the Tuesday-night Arizona Constitution class, it was city council, school board, “Goldwater for President” rallies, reelect Johnson rallies, Democratic powwows, Republican powwows, weekend festivals.
I camped out one whole weekend with National Guard troops playing war games—sprinting through the desert, diving into the dirt, firing on pop-up enemy targets—and produced a full-page photo essay. I crept into John Birch Society rallies and collected right-wing propaganda—a screed on the Supreme Court, “Nine Men Against America”; Joseph McCarthy’s “America’s Retreat from Victory”; and pamphlets on CIA clandestine operations in Bolivia.
My boss urged me to join the Birchers, saying he would give me a day a week for as long as I needed to write an insider exposé. No, too slimy! I wasn’t a spy or an undercover man. But when he asked me to write editorials, I jumped at the chance and wrote the paper’s endorsement of Lyndon Johnson over what’s his name, that local guy—Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
I also covered Glendale High and became as familiar with the sprawling campus as Annie was. I shot a group photo of all the new teachers—Ann Garretson front and center. I wrote a feature on the cross-country team (how long-distance runners deal with the pain) and one on the marching band (the many hours of practice needed to perform so precisely each Friday night).
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 34
