Hey, guess what? Spring finally got here and it’s a beaut. There are lilac bushes all over the place, and just when you think pastels have taken over the world, you see a patch of bawdy red tulips or brilliant yellow crocuses. Imagine the world being frozen for so long and still being able to come up with these surprises.
I did go to a Pilots’ Wives luncheon—they served a fancy ambrosia salad and chicken divan and the food reminded me of the kind they served at the Vernell Hotel in Oklahoma City, the kind of food that waiter boyfriend of yours would bring home to us in white paper sacks. Anyway, the gals I met there seemed nice enough, but all we did was sit around all afternoon talking about our husbands’ seniority and what routes they fly. The real friends I’m starting to make are here in my neighborhood—and my book club. I can just hear you asking with your hands on your skinny little hips, “Now what the Sam Hill is this book club you’re talkin’ about?” Well, we pick a book and talk about it and then eat a really good potluck—mostly desserts. I had the first meeting at my house and picked a book by a guy named Bernard Malamud (it wasn’t the kind of book I was dying to read, but I wanted everyone to think it was). Anyway, it was a lot of fun. There are four other gals (we might ask others to join later on, but right now we’re going to keep it small) besides me, and there’s not a dumb one in the bunch, at least not overtly. Merit is so quiet, I haven’t figured out yet if she’s dumb or just thoughtful. Brains probably never meant too much to her—she’s the kind of beautiful that makes you feel sort of mad and churned up in your stomach, but her looks seem to embarrass her, which makes it easier not to hate her! Audrey’s the resident sex queen—she feels underdressed unless she’s wearing a cleavage—and Slip’s the resident firebrand peacenik who’ll try to recruit you into any leftist cause that comes along. The two of them argue like Frick and Frack, even when they’re on the same side. What saves them is they’re both funny. Remember how you used to say, “If a man can make me laugh, he don’t need money or looks”? Me, I feel the same way about friends (and lucky for Slip she’s funny, because her looks aren’t anything to write home about . . . but then again, I am writing about them).
Last, there’s Kari—she’s a couple years younger than you, Mama, and is the type who thinks before she speaks. I’m glad she does, because she’ll say something that’ll make me think. There’s something about Kari that makes me feel calm—after listening to her I feel like I’ve drunk a warm glass of milk.
Being with them has started to make this frozen wasteland feel like home—not that I’m so familiar with what that feels like.
As for those twins of mine that you’re just so crazy about and send so many darling presents to (hey, I can dream, can’t I?): Beau’s up from his nap—I can hear him snuffling around in his crib—so I’d better get in there before he wakes Bonnie. I like my time alone with Beau—Bonnie has the big personality that takes over, so it’s nice just to play with him alone sometimes and wallow in his sweet little-boy self.
Oh, Mama, how I wish you could read this! But how do I send a letter to purgatory? (Ha-ha—that’s a joke, and come on, at least I don’t automatically assume you went even lower.)
I’m sorry,
Faith
To say that Faith had had a fractious childhood was to say that a began the alphabet. Primrose Reynolds, named after the town she was born in and not the path she took (which in her case led to disaster), was sixteen years old when she delivered Faith in the ripped backseat of a 1938 Studebaker, ten miles outside Little Rock.
“I tried to keep you in till we could get to the hospital,” she told her daughter, “but y’all were so damn pushy! Just had to get out and see the wide world!”
This story would inevitably cause Primmy to convulse in laughter; of course, most stories did, seeing as she only told them when she was drunk and feeling good. When she was drunk and feeling bad she’d cry—not quietly into a handkerchief, but loud enough so that the neighbors in whatever run-down, urine-smelling pay-by-the-week dive they were living in at the time would yell out their doors, “Shut your trap or I’ll shut it for you!” or “You want something to cry about? I’ll give you something to cry about!”
Faith would sit on the thin mattress of the bed her mother shared with her when she wasn’t “entertaining” (then Faith slept on a folded blanket on the floor, or on the couch if they happened to have one), patting her mama’s shaking shoulders, lying to her that “it’ll be all right.”
When things got too rough for Primmy, when she lost a job or a boyfriend or the desire to get up in the morning, Faith would be sent to live with her grandmother in the small town of Trilby, Mississippi.
MawMaw wasn’t mean to Faith, but removed, as if she had seen that emotion invested in people never garnered a profitable return.
Still, that small house with the blistered gray clapboards (not only on the wrong side of the tracks, but right next to them) gave Faith a stability she never had with her mother, gave her her good friend Della-Rose, gave her acres of woods to run in as they reenacted Civil War battles, gave her regular meals and her own bed to sleep in.
She stayed with MawMaw for months at a time, and once for her entire second grade year at school; the day when her mother came to fetch her became not a reward but a punishment.
“Look at how my baby’s grown!” Primmy would say, pressing Faith to her until the girl was sure she was going to pass out from lack of oxygen and a surplus of anxiety. “Just look at my baby!”
Primmy would always be dressed up for these reclaiming occasions, always wearing a bright, shiny dress that Faith, even at a young age, knew was not the kind worn by the nice women who walked by the house on their way to church. She rouged her cheeks with a heavy hand and blackened her eyebrows with pencil, and the bluish red lipstick she wore made her mouth look like a wound. Primmy Reynolds was a young and pretty woman, but her clothes, makeup, and reliance on liquor and cigarettes conspired to make her look worn and cheap. Faith would cry in her arms, and not with tears of joy.
When MawMaw died suddenly of a stroke while hoeing rocks out of her narrow, weedy garden, Primmy moved into her house, but the drunkenness and trail of boyfriends ruined whatever security Faith had felt there, and her own life began spiraling out of control, began to mimic her mother’s in the drinking and the boyfriends and the sense of desperation.
Faith would automatically start shivering anytime she thought of how close she had come to being Primmy junior—how but for a simple question her life became more than she had ever dreamed possible.
The question, “What colleges are you planning to apply to?” was asked at the end of Faith’s junior year by a guidance counselor new to the school, who wore a wide handlebar mustache that reminded Faith of the horns of water buffalo she’d seen in National Geographic and a tweed jacket that smelled of mothballs.
Shifting in the hard wooden chair, Faith rolled her eyes.
“Let’s see,” she said, examining the fine line of dirt underneath her thumbnail. “Besides Radcliffe, there’s Wellesley, and oh yeah, I think the Sorbonne wants me too.”
“I bet they would,” said the counselor, offering a smile that stretched his handlebar mustache even wider.
“Right,” said Faith. “Can I go now?”
The counselor leaned forward on his desk, and now, along with mothballs, Faith could smell body odor.
“I don’t care how hard you try to hide it, Miss Reynolds,” he said, “but you’re a smart girl. Your tests scores are high and your grades . . . well, we know they could be a lot better, but as I said, your test scores are high, and with teacher recommendations—”
“Who’s going to recommend me?” asked Faith of the teachers with whom she had a tepid relationship at best.
Twirling one end of his mustache, the counselor peered at a sheaf of paper.
“Well, Mrs. Allison seems to think you’re a gifted English student.”
“She does?” asked Faith. Any compliment Mrs. Allison had for Faith was shadowed by cri
ticism: I liked the way you expressed your thoughts, but honestly, your handwriting is so sloppy I could hardly read your paper.
“Yes, and Mr. Christopherson says you have an acute grasp of history.”
“It’s just that we studied the Civil War,” said Faith. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always been interested in the Civil War.”
Behind his thick glasses, the guidance counselor’s eyes gleamed like those of a prospector finding gold in his pan. Faith crossed her arms, sullen again. Why had she bothered to tell this pathetic creep anything?
Lingering after school because she hadn’t wanted to go home, Faith had once overheard, through an open door, a conversation the guidance counselor was having with Miss Franklin, the home ec teacher.
“Ernest,” she’d said, “no offense, but I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last man alive.”
Now this man, who was a pariah to the prettiest teacher at Pawnee High, set aside the papers and, still twisting his mustache, fixed his smudged and magnified gaze at Faith, expecting her to pay attention to him.
“Is that all, Mr. Teague?” she asked, standing up. “Because I really gotta go.”
Undefeated, Mr. Teague offered a smile. “That’s not all, Faith. Don’t let it be all. It doesn’t hurt to shoot for the moon.”
As if it were a hot and itchy sweater, Faith shook off the advice, or at least she thought she did. But hours after her accident, when Billy Lawler fished her out of the Tallahalla River, she lay on her thin and lumpy mattress, her head throbbing from its wound, belching burps that tasted of sour beer, crying softly, and wishing that her mother were home, if not to offer comfort, then to at least scream at her for her stupid, nearly lethal behavior. What good did it do to nearly drown if there wasn’t anybody around to care?
Tangled up in a gray, pilly blanket, Faith felt swaddled in misery itself. The thought occurred to her that maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad to stay under those cold rushing waters, to stay under and not come up.
Her life seemed as dark and weighted as the night sky, seen through the windowpane that Primmy had cracked years ago when she threw a shoe at a retreating boyfriend.
I could have been dead. The thought was tinged not with awed relief but with regret. But then the clouds, pushed along by a night breeze, tore apart, revealing a yellow and pitted moon, and Mr. Teague’s words came back to her, and for a moment she didn’t feel so bruised and broken.
Well, why not shoot for it? she thought. That moon’s there as much for me as for anybody.
The summer passed, and if she wasn’t exactly a new Faith, at least she was an improved one: not automatically accepting every bottle of beer handed to her, not smoking until she got a headache, and, most importantly, not accepting every boy’s invitation to climb into the backseat of whatever borrowed vehicle was available.
When she started her senior year, she made a promise to herself that she’d make all A’s, and she did, even when she had to miss eleven straight days to take care of her mother, who had come down with a case of jaundice that turned her yellow as pus.
She spent long, conversational afternoons with Mr. Teague during which he helped her research colleges and fill out grant and scholarship applications.
When she burst into his office to show him the letter that informed her she had won an academic scholarship to the University of Texas, the counselor took off his chronically smudged glasses to wipe his eyes.
“Thank you for all you’ve done for me,” she said, feeling a little teary herself.
“Just doing my job, Faith,” he said, unused to student gratitude. He twisted the end of his mustache. “Just like you did yours.”
They hugged then, because those were the days when affection could pass between teacher and student without fear of overstepping the guidelines listed in the district sexual harassment manual.
In Mr. Teague’s thin, musty-smelling arms, Faith felt as cared for and buoyed as she ever had in her life. As they drew away from each other, she said, “That Miss Franklin is a damn fool.”
IN AUSTIN, UNBURDENED BY her home or her past, Faith reinvented herself, flourishing academically and socially. She made the dean’s list and the cheerleading squad, and interested a number of boys (whom she didn’t sleep with). By the time she met Wade at the end of her junior year, her confidence was such that yes, of course, she deserved him. It was a fairly constant confidence on the outside, but one she battled to maintain on the inside, especially when her mother, making threats to visit, began shaking it. But then her mother died, and even though it was an awful death and one that haunted Faith, it nonetheless freed Faith from what she had been all her life, what now nobody ever had to know: “no-account,” “white trash,” and “daughter of the town tramp and just as trampy herself.”
She became a new Faith, born of a different set of parents, into a different world.
In English class, she laughed silently as her professor quoted Keats. Believe me, she thought, truth is not beauty; the Faith I’ve made is a lot less ugly than the one that’s real.
It wasn’t so hard fooling everybody; however, always being careful was exhausting. But Faith knew being tired was nothing compared to being found out.
June 1968
HOSTESS: MERIT
BOOK: Hotel by Arthur Hailey
REASON CHOSEN: “Well, it is a bestseller.”
When Merit told Eric that she was joining a book club, her husband had laughed out loud. Then, as if someone had abruptly turned a switch, his laughter stopped. Shaking his head, he said, “No way, Mere.”
“What do you mean, Eric?”
“What do I mean?” he said, smiling a mirthless smile. “I mean I don’t see the benefit of you joining a bunch of women who sit around eating bon bons, yakking about some asinine love story.”
“We’re not going to be talking about a love story,” she said, her voice high as a young girl’s. “We’re going to be discussing The Fixer. It’s about—”
“I don’t give a shit what it’s about!” said Eric, picking a copy of Life magazine off the coffee table and flinging it across the room. “I don’t want you joining a book club!”
Merit, sitting next to him on the couch, willed her body not to shiver, even though it felt as though her blood had been replaced with something cold, because Eric didn’t like it when she acted scared; it made him yell even louder and accuse her of trying to make him feel bad for setting the rules in his own house.
“Eric,” she said, her voice straining as she tried to keep it even and light, “you’re always saying how you wished I’d graduated from a four-year college, and this would be a chance—”
“I thought we were going to have a nice quiet evening at home.”
“—to improve myself; I mean, it would almost be like taking a class, and—”
“I don’t get many opportunities to have a nice quiet evening.”
“—besides, I think it’d be nice to get together with the neighbors, and you wouldn’t have to do anything to help me get ready—”
Crack. Merit felt the blow to her cheek immediately, felt the white-hot flash of pain, but it took a moment for her brain to process the terrible information that the cause of the pain now radiating from her cheekbone up into her eye had been her husband’s hand.
“Oh, God, Mere,” he said, his face suddenly pale as wax. “Oh, God, what happened?”
You hit me, that’s what happened! she wanted to scream, but didn’t, and as much as she wanted to lurch off the couch and out of the arms he wrapped around her, she didn’t. Instead she sat and trembled as tears from his eyes wet her cheeks, sat and trembled as he told her over and over how sorry he was, but he’d been under so much pressure at the hospital and she kept pushing and pushing and he’d never do anything to hurt her, she knew that, didn’t she?
After his long, droning apology, a wave of nausea washed over Merit as he pressed his lips against her throbbing cheek. Desperately she swallowed down the bile; she was fairl
y certain that upchucking in her husband’s lap was not the way to ensure his repentance.
“I’m going to get some ice for that,” he said, patting her knee as he stood up, and when he was out of the room, Merit cupped her hands over her mouth and screamed. It wasn’t a loud scream—she didn’t want Eric to hear her. It was more a squeal, and as soon as it filled her ears she realized she might not be able to stop it. A new fear rose in her—what would he do to her if she couldn’t stop screaming?—but then the baby inside her pelted her with a boom-boom-boom of kicks, her little baby was telling her to knock it off, it would be good for everyone if she just knocked it off, and because of her baby, she was able to take her hands from her mouth and stop her high-pitched wail.
He held the ice bag to her cheek gently, telling her that it was going to be all right, that it would be red for a while but surely there would be no bruise, and if there was, God forbid, she should just tell everyone she banged it on the edge of the cupboard or something, and don’t worry, it would never happen again.
She looked into his gray-blue eyes, and more than anything she had ever wanted in her life, she wanted to believe him.
MERIT HAD BEEN THE FIRST member of the Mayes family to leave Decorah, Iowa, since her ancestors had settled there four generations earlier. It was a move that was not celebrated with farewell toasts; neither was a bon voyage party thrown.
“It’s the devil’s path you’re taking,” said her father.
Pastor Mayes did not reserve sermonizing or grand speeches or his pithy axioms for the pulpit. Something as simple as buttering toast (“waste not, want not”) or asking if anyone had seen the hairbrush (“pride goeth before the fall”) incited the minister’s rhetoric—rhetoric that Merit, by the time she had finished high school (class of ’61; secretary, Future Farmers of America; choir; Community Key Club; Best-Looking Girl) was thoroughly sick of.
She made the decision to move to a big city (she considered Des Moines, but Minneapolis was closer) the night of her senior prom, when she was in the arms of Richard Pelke, a boy who managed, even with a crew cut, to have severe dandruff.
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