My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  Robbie made it through elementary school with a combination of charm and determination. When he was in seventh grade, he took up track and football and met a coach who changed his life.

  My brother could run like a deer. Even when he was a tiny boy, my dad had a hard time keeping up with him. If he got into trouble and knew my dad was looking for him, he would race around the house as fast as he could to avoid a spanking. Daddy knew there was no possible way to catch Robbie. He would have to outsmart him. One day he waited for Robbie to circle the house, and when he came around the corner, Daddy stepped out in front of him. It frightened Robbie so, he shot straight up in the air. Daddy fell over laughing and gave up any idea of punishing him. Robbie was such a fetching child, you just couldn’t stay mad at him. When Robbie and I were still in diapers, Mother would put us down for naps in the same room. He hated naps and always managed to escape from his crib. Often he made it clear out of the house. Somehow he was able to unlatch the screen and crawl out. My mother happened to look out the kitchen window one afternoon and saw Robbie out on the back road, wearing only his diaper, marching up and down through a puddle with one of Daddy’s hunting rifles over his shoulder while the other neighborhood mothers grabbed their own children and pulled them inside to safety.

  Another afternoon, when Robbie was eight or nine, the whole family was driving back from picking blackberries in the country when a jackrabbit ran down the road. Robbie shouted, “Daddy, let me out! Let me out! I want to catch that rabbit!”

  “Oh, Robbie, you can’t catch a rabbit,” my dad said. “It’s too fast.”

  “No, Daddy! Let me out! I can catch him!”

  So Daddy pulled the car over and opened the door. He was chuckling to himself, figuring this would teach his son a lesson. Robbie took off down the road and disappeared into the thicket. A few minutes later, Robbie reappeared holding the rabbit.

  When Robbie joined the track team, his coach, Fred Billings, started working with him to channel his energy into running and help him focus on his schoolwork. Before long, Robbie was making better grades than I was because he worked so hard at it. And once he started competing on the sports field, nobody could beat him. By the time he was in high school, he was a bona fide star in the relay race and hurdles. The whole family would go out to watch him run at all of his track meets. Daddy took reel after reel of 8mm home movies that captured Robbie’s grace as he flew over the hurdles and his long strides as he sprinted across the finish line.

  In May of 1966, when he was a high school junior and I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore, Robbie started to feel run down. He was still running and winning, but he was tired all the time and achy at night; he just didn’t feel right. At first we thought it might be a cold or flu that he couldn’t shake, or maybe he was training too hard.

  One night I was arguing with Robbie about something, and Mother pulled me into another room for a private talk.

  “Please be patient with Robbie,” she said. “I’m worried about him. He could be really sick.” She paused for a moment, then said, “He might even have leukemia.”

  “Oh, Mother,” I snapped. “He’s fine!” He was my brother; nothing could happen to him.

  My parents took Robbie to see Ben Merritt, our family doctor who had known us kids just about all our lives. He examined him and did some blood tests. When they came back from the lab, Ben just couldn’t bring himself to tell us. So he sent Robbie to a hematologist in Tyler, who finally made the diagnosis. Mother had been right.

  It was surreal. We’d gotten a diagnosis, but we really didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t know how afraid to be. I guess mostly we felt kind of numb.

  After the initial shock, our family rallied together and approached Robbie’s illness as a problem that could be confronted, like any other. My uncle Wade Spilman, who had been in the Texas legislature and knew everybody important in the state, arranged for Robbie to be admitted to one of the best hospitals in the country for the treatment of leukemia and other cancers: MD Anderson in Houston. My mother called our friend and high school principal, W. T. Black, to let him know that Robbie would be missing the rest of the semester, while Robbie told his coach and his teammates the bad news. He had to start chemotherapy right away. But he had one last thing to do before going into the hospital.

  Robbie had been training hard all year to qualify for the state track finals in Austin the next weekend. Our plan had been to drive down, meet up with Ed, attend the meet together, and watch Robbie win. But now, of course, all that would change.

  First Robbie called the boy that he had beaten to make it to the finals and said, “I’m not gonna be able to run, and I wanted you to know that you’re up.” Then we drove on to Austin as planned. I know Robbie wanted to be there to cheer on his teammates, but also, I think, to help steel himself for the unknown that he was facing. When we got to the stadium, Robbie went down to the track to see the runner who had taken his place. He shook his hand, wished him good luck, and helped him set his blocks.

  One of the officials saw Robbie in his street clothes and yelled for him to get off the field. But the young man stepped between them and said, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. He should be the one running. He beat me.”

  My brother was in and out of MD Anderson for the next sixteen months.

  Robbie’s illness turned our ordinary, orderly lives upside down. Mother was no longer working at the courthouse, and Daddy took a leave of absence from his job as the county agriculture agent. We rented an apartment in Houston to be near the hospital during Robbie’s treatments. Ed commuted back and forth from college in Austin, and I did the same from Quitman. I missed a lot of school, but my teachers let me make up the work. Sometimes my grandmother would come up from Granger to stay with me. Sometimes I lived with the other Spaceks, my aunt and uncle Sam and Maurine, and my cousins Jan and Sam. Sometimes it was just me and the dog. I had to grow up fast in those months, but everyone in Quitman looked out for me.

  When I was in Houston, I spent all my time with Robbie on the hospital’s sixth-floor pediatric cancer wing. I made friends with the other leukemia patients, who were all young teenage boys, like Robbie. We got to know their families. In fact, we became like one extended family, all facing the same challenge.

  The treatment for leukemia wipes out the good blood cells along with the cancer cells, so after chemotherapy, the patients are extremely susceptible to infections. Robbie and the other boys often couldn’t leave the hospital, and it got boring for them pretty quickly. It was always a cause for celebration when someone’s blood counts went up and they could go out and be teenagers for a little while. When Robbie’s counts were high enough, we’d go out for lunch or to a movie, or even to the Astrodome for a ball game. If any of his friends had good enough counts, we’d take them along with us to join in the fun.

  Every Wednesday there was a big party on the sixth floor. We’d decorate the lounge and serve refreshments. I’d bring my guitar and put on a concert. Sometimes football players or astronauts from the Houston Space Center came by to visit. Robbie had his picture taken with an astronaut and thought it was pretty cool. It made the boys feel like they mattered; that they hadn’t been forgotten just because they were ill.

  Robbie had been so healthy and strong before he developed leukemia, and he just couldn’t get used to being sick. He refused to give in to the disease, and rarely lost his sense of humor. In his mind, he was still in training. And so every day, when Freddie, everyone’s favorite orderly, would pull the big trash cans out of the rooms and into the hall to be picked up and emptied, Robbie would run down the hallway and hurdle them. Often there would be a huge cheer.

  When Robbie’s counts were good, he could stay with us in the apartment we rented in Houston. Robbie’s friends from home would take turns coming down to visit. One time Daddy took some Super 8 footage of Robbie and me and a few girlfriends from Quitman lounging around the pool at our apartment complex. In the film, Robbie looks relaxed and handsome,
in a white shirt and chinos over a long, lean runner’s body. When he puts his arm around my shoulders, I barely come up to his neck. Later, Daddy filmed Robbie sitting quietly in a lawn chair, occasionally looking over and smiling. My father, who usually liked to move the camera around, held the shot on his son for a long time, as if he were trying to memorize him.

  It was difficult when one by one, our friends on the sixth floor would die, and the boys who were left would wonder if their number was up next. When a patient died, it affected all of us: the other patients, the families, the nurses, the orderlies, and the doctors. The staff was so caring and emotionally involved with the patients that I wondered how they could carry on in the face of such constant loss. Of all the boys on the sixth floor, I only knew of one who was cured and sent home. He was a beacon of hope for all of us.

  There were times of brief remission between treatments when Robbie was well enough to come home to Quitman for short visits. One time I found him waiting for me in the driveway when I got home from school. He was sitting in the sun on the back of our big old 1956 Buick, grinning from ear to ear, holding up the Dallas Morning News. The headline said, CURE FOUND FOR LEUKEMIA. There were so many times like that, when we would all get our hopes up, only to have them dashed.

  Robbie had always wanted a sports car, and my dad decided to buy him one. They walked into a foreign car showroom in Houston to look at a Triumph, which was the car Robbie had always wanted, but right next to it was an Austin Healey 3000 Mark III convertible in British racing green. It was love at first sight. Daddy bought that Austin Healey for Robbie on the spot. He could drive around town with the top down, when the chemo wasn’t making him sick as a dog. That fall he was well enough to drive the car back home for a visit. He even drove the Healey in the high school homecoming parade, with some of his teammates perched on the back. Robbie’s hair was growing back in thin patches and his face was swollen from steroids, but he had that old familiar smile as he cruised slowly up Main Street. I was right in front of him, marching with the band in my white Keds and short shorts, twirling my baton for all it was worth.

  Robbie kept up his schoolwork while he was in Houston, and that spring he was able to graduate with his senior class. When he walked to the podium to receive his diploma, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. It was like the whole town of Quitman was up there with him.

  Robbie took me for a drive one night in the Austin Healey. When we reached the farmland outside of town, where the road was flat and straight, Robbie opened up the engine. The little sports car growled happily, like a captive animal that was finally set free. With the top down and the wind lashing my hair around my face, Robbie kept going faster and faster until we were flying along that two-lane road at one hundred miles an hour. To me, it was exhilarating, even better than riding the Tubs at the Old Settlers’ Reunion. But after a few minutes, Robbie eased off the gas pedal and coasted down to a modest speed, then turned toward home.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, not looking at me.

  “Why? It was fun!”

  “No, I shouldn’t have done that with you in the car. I’ve got nothing to lose, but you do.”

  Our mother was steady as a rock through Robbie’s illness. She never once left his side when he was sick from chemo, and spent every night with him in the hospital, sleeping in a chair or on a cot. Something deep within her kept her going. My dad put on a brave face, but it was a struggle. He had always been our protector. If he said it was going to rain, it did. If he said it was warm enough to go barefoot, it was. But this was something different, something so big, even he couldn’t protect us from it.

  With his scientist’s mind, he researched everything he could about leukemia, trying to find any connection between the disease and the chemicals that were used to kill weeds and pests. He wondered if the radiation treatments Robbie had taken to clear up his skin might have been the trigger, or being downwind from the nuclear testing at Los Alamos, or even the benign-looking shoe-measuring machine in Hirsch’s store that bombarded our feet with gamma rays. There was never a definitive answer, of course, and never would be.

  I was cheerful as always, at least on the outside, tackling the world with a confident smile. But the weight of my brother’s illness had landed square on my shoulders. I felt helpless. I would wake up in the morning, fresh, my worries washed away with sleep. And then I would remember: It wasn’t a bad dream. Robbie was still sick. The fear and grief would come in waves, and sometimes a lump rose in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.

  Now, when I sat in my room to write songs, often in an empty house, the melodies came out in a minor key, and the lyrics were different. My parents were concerned about me. And so, when the opportunity came along for me to get away from Texas for a couple of months, they decided to let me go.

  Despite my frequent absences, I had managed to keep up my school activities during junior year. I dated; I went to twirling practice and attended my junior prom. That spring I even entered the Dogwood Queen beauty pageant. I had talent, but I didn’t have much height. At five feet, two and a half inches, I had been the tallest girl in sixth grade, and then I stopped short. My mom took me to see Ben Merritt and asked him if I would grow any more. The doctor looked at me and shook his head. “Oh sure, she’ll grow, just not north or south,” he said. The other girls in the pageant were more beauty queen material, but I won second place and the talent competition, playing my guitar and singing my songs. My performance caught the attention of one of the judges, a writer from the style section of the newspaper in Longview, a city in the oil fields east of Quitman. She hired me to sing and play at parties, where I was a big hit. That summer, she invited me to go along with her to New York, where she was covering a week of fashion shows. She thought it would be a fun distraction for me. My plan was to fly up with her and then stay with my cousin Rip and his family in Manhattan.

  At first my parents were reluctant to send a seventeen-year-old who had rarely been out of Texas on her own to New York City. And I was torn between wanting to go, and worrying about leaving Robbie. His remissions were getting shorter, and he was growing weaker. But he encouraged me to go and have a good time. We even talked about him coming up there if his blood counts got better.

  My whole family went with me to the airport, Love Field in Dallas, where I was supposed to meet up with the woman from Longview. She had a regular ticket to New York; I was flying student standby on the Fourth of July weekend. She got on the plane, but I was stuck in the airport for the next two days as every flight to New York filled up with soldiers before I could get on. I never saw that fashion writer again. Rip rented a car to pick me up at Kennedy Airport and was waiting for me there for nearly twenty-four hours, meeting every flight from Dallas—there were no cell phones in 1967, so we weren’t able to reach him. He eventually gave up and went home.

  It was my first time flying, but when I finally got on an airplane, I was so exhausted that most of my excitement had drained away. But at the end of the flight, when I saw those New York skyscrapers stretched out below me, filling the whole window from one end to the other, I felt a thrill race through my body. And I knew, with all the conviction of my seventeen years, that I would never be quite the same again.

  I stepped into the sweltering terminal wearing patent leather shoes, a suit, and carrying my two guitars. I may even have been wearing gloves. I had bleached my hair blond and rolled it into a straight pageboy with bangs, like Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary. I was so young, people would have thought I was a runaway, except that I was so appropriately dressed. My dad had instructed me to take a taxi to Rip’s address in Chelsea. “And act like you’ve been there before,” he said. So I got into the front seat with the cabdriver. On the ride into Manhattan I nearly wrenched my neck gaping up at all the tall buildings, just like the kid from Texas I so obviously was.

  The sign above the doorbell on the Chelsea brownstone said: TORN PAGE. I thought that was so clever and romantic, just like th
e wonderful couple who lived in that house with their three young children.

  Rip had met the brilliant actor Geraldine Page in 1959, when they were both performing in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. My handsome cousin from Taylor, Texas, had hitchhiked to Hollywood when he was in his early twenties, hoping to be a movie star. But he ended up moving to New York City in the late fifties to hone his skills as an actor, studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. When she married Rip in 1963, Geraldine Page had been a force on Broadway for more than a decade. Around that time she starred in a couple of film versions of Williams’s plays, and the Hollywood press declared her an “overnight success.” “That’s the longest night I’ve ever seen,” she said. She was funny and elegant, with a soft, lovely voice and the most beautiful hands.

  When I arrived at their doorstep, the poor country cousin, Rip and Gerry were the toast of the New York theater and art scene. Gerry was starring in the Broadway production of Black Comedy/White Lies, doing eight performances a week. Yet they opened a space in their busy lives and made me feel safe and welcome.

  Rip had an office on the second floor, with a piano, a rehearsal space, a bathroom, and a fold-out couch. He turned it into a room for me. When I opened my eyes on my first morning in New York, Rip and Gerry’s three babies—Angelica and the twin boys, Tony and John, who were still in diapers—were quietly staring at me, inches from my face, waiting for me to wake up. I had big curlers in my hair and must have looked like an alien life form to them.