I asked her what she remembered about first meeting Dad.
“My best friend and I went to interview him for the school newspaper.” Already I had the story wrong. She hadn’t been alone. But she remembered the details of that meeting—it had mattered to her: “He had on those ugly yellow coaching pants and a white coach’s shirt. And his hair was real blond. You could tell he’d been out in the sun all summer.”
They started chatting after ball games but it was never serious. (“Your dad was talking to a bunch of girls.”) And she was dating someone else at the time. But they were dating each other by January.
She said Dad continued seeing other people because he couldn’t bring her to parties or school events. “We couldn’t go out in public. And he was out—him and Danny—being a little on the wild side.” I laughed. “So where did you hang out with him? At his house?”
“Yeah, you know. Or just in the car somewhere.”
“Sounds scandalous!” I said, and she only laughed.
I asked about Tammy, the other cheerleader: Were she and Dad serious? “I don’t think so. But I think maybe she could’ve been his first choice.” She paused. “Maybe. I don’t know. But I think she just ended up not liking him or something. I found all this out later.” Then she added, “Your dad always imagined being with some petite, dark-haired girl. And that’s who Tammy was. But I don’t think he knew much about her. She was a little on the slutty side.” She laughed drily. “Or maybe he did know about her.” (For my part, I am guessing she was just a typical teenage girl.)
And when were she and Dad finally serious? I asked. “On graduation day we left together. And we passed the principal and the teachers and I was in his car. Once I graduated, it didn’t matter—at least that’s what I thought, anyway. That probably tells you what a bad school system it was—he would’ve gotten in so much trouble somewhere else.” I thought of the photos I’d seen of her graduation, of how she glowed in her gold cap and gown.
“But once you told me you were dating other people right up until you got engaged,” I said.
“Well, it was both of us, not just me. He said I was young and I hadn’t gotten to experience college. So we agreed to date other people, which was the right thing to do. I dated a couple of guys, but nothing serious at all.”
I asked about the engagement: “It was an ongoing discussion. Then Christmas, I guess my sophomore year of college, he had bought a ring. We had looked at rings, so I knew he was going to ask me. I told him he had to ask Dad, so they went out when I was home at Christmas. And after that he just couldn’t wait. And he was like, ‘Let’s go for a ride,’ so we went to the road near the airport up on the hill. He just pulled over at a gravel turnoff and proposed.”
She said she was not surprised, but she was happy. “We were going to a party that night and he wanted me to wear the ring.”
• • •
To my mom, facts have always been more powerful than story, which made interviewing her easier than I’d expected. She has no impulse for embellishment. She does not crave the forces of fate.
I called my dad the next day. “I want to ask you a few questions about how you and Mom met and got together,” I explained, feeling nervous. “Is that okay?”
He laughed. “What did Mom say?”
“I talked to her yesterday. I just want to see how my version of your love story is different from how you remember it. Do you remember the first time you met?”
“You know, I really don’t know, to be honest with you. It had to be through Cindy. You probably heard of the one infamous time that we went to the Patio Drive-In and I had no money and she had no money.” He turned reflective. “Times were hard, to be honest with you. There was not much money to be spent.”
I reminded him about the interview with Mom and her friend. A light went on: “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
“Do you remember when you guys became more than friends?” I asked.
He laughed loudly but didn’t answer. “What did Mom say?”
“You have to answer first!”
“It was raining one day—just pouring down the rain one afternoon. I lived out in the west end of town and after school somebody came and knocked on my door. She was with somebody in the car—I can’t remember who. But she came in and that was the first time I kissed her. I just remember it was pouring rain.” I noticed the pleasure in his voice before he returned to the question at hand: “So from that point on I think it became more than just social friends.”
“That’s sweet,” I said. “When was that?” I began to see that if I paused, he would fill the silence with story.
“It was right after school and I wasn’t at football practice, so it had to have been winter. During the football playoffs we all rode one bus. The coaches sit in the front; then you have the cheerleaders; then you have the players in the back. I think I was maybe in the second seat back one night and your mom was in the third seat. I don’t know if that was just coincidence. But we talked a lot on the bus coming back from Norton that night.”
I asked him about seeing other people while he was dating Mom. “Well, you know, I really didn’t see anyone consistently. Because Danny and I were having a good time—let’s put it that way.” He laughed nostalgically. “We really had a nice time. He’s really just a great guy. I’ve missed him these past few years.” He meant since the divorce. He seemed wistful.
“So you were seeing other people?” I tried to clarify.
“Well, me and Danny always had an invitation somewhere, it seemed like. We’d go to parties and hang out with people, and we played summer softball and volleyball.”
“But Mom says there was another cheerleader named Tammy that you took to meet Granny before you took Mom.”
“Yeah, well, we were friends, sort of seeing each other. But it wasn’t serious. It really just fell apart. She was kind of a mean spirit.”
“Mom says she always thought she—Mom—was your second choice.”
“No. Not at all,” he said quickly. “Mom had such a kinder, gentler spirit about her.”
“How did you feel about the fact that you were an employee of the school dating a student?”
“You know, at that time, Mandy, you weren’t supposed to, but it wasn’t really talked about. It wasn’t discussed. Now that I look back on it—to say that it was wrong? Yeah, it was wrong. But at the time—it’s been almost forty years—I don’t mean it was a pervasive thing that went on, but it was not an uncommon thing in Lee County. Over in the coal mining area, it was just not a big deal.”
“Do you think that has anything to do with how few people live there?” I asked. “I mean, with fewer people, did people have to be more open-minded about their relationships?”
“I do think so.” He paused. “Mom was very smart—though she didn’t even think she was. She was cute, smart, blond, all the things you look for. Cute smile. She was very reserved, kind of bashful and timid. Not your typical cheerleader.” I smiled as he spoke. I liked hearing the absence of regret in his voice. “And she had aspirations to be more than what Lee County had to offer her. And I think I brought an outside influence that she gravitated to. I would talk to her about things that were beyond Lee County. And I just liked talking to her about it. And she liked listening.”
“It’s funny that you say you were an outside influence, because you were only from a couple of hours away,” I told him. “It was all the same part of Virginia.”
“But the culture that she came from and the culture that I came from were entirely different. The coal mining mentality was so different from my life on the farm. Pennington was up in the hollers and it was just a dirty coal mining, mountainous town. Even going to the Patio, you sat in the car and they came out and waited on you and you threw your trash out on the ground. And I’d come from this clean little town.”
I thought how accurate that was: In Appalachia, the regional distinctions can be significant. The town of ten thousand where I was born and raised
always felt like a mecca of arts and culture compared to the communities my parents came from.
“I remember plain as day when I went to interview,” Dad said, “and the principal told me he always made sure there was cornbread and a pot of soup beans in the cafeteria. Because some kids couldn’t afford lunch and he didn’t want anyone to go hungry. Of course, I took that job because they canceled my student loans for teaching in a poverty school district. We were poor when I was growing up, but food was never an issue. We always had plenty to eat, a good variety, and meat. It was probably the best thing in life that happened to me, to get out and see more of the world.”
When I asked about the decision to get married, he remembered it easily. “Mom was away at school, and one Sunday afternoon I drove her back to campus. We went to a park and we just talked about getting married at some point in time. And I found out later that she had ordered crystal—this wedding china. Somebody had come through school selling it, and she bought some.”
“The monogrammed glasses we had growing up?” I asked.
“Yeah. That china we kept in the dining room. She bought it before we were even engaged. So I guess she took that conversation very seriously.” He laughed.
“Did you pick out the ring?”
“Danny and I went shopping together and I picked it out.”
I pictured the modest diamond ring my mom used to wear—it must’ve been such a big purchase for him. “You know, when I lived in Pennington, I made sixty-five hundred dollars a year,” he said. “I made that salary teaching full-time and coaching three sports. And honestly, I thought if I could ever make ten thousand dollars a year, I would be in the high cotton. I mean, honestly, what I have now versus what I thought I would have; it’s just entirely different.”
When you are a twenty-six-year-old man and you have little money and little opportunity, but you have a cute, smart, kindhearted young girlfriend and a 0.3-carat diamond ring and a set of wedding china, I imagine it is easy to see future happiness stretching out in front of you indefinitely. Today my dad and my mom live separately and alone with their dogs. They both seem pretty happy with the lives they’ve made. But I’m sure it isn’t the life they imagined when they bought the ring and the china.
I loved my parents’ story because it allowed me to believe that a girl who was smart and modest could be chosen by someone who was good and charming and well liked. But the very things that make a love story compelling—the sense of order, of belonging, of cause and effect—are also the things that separate story from real life.
• • •
There is another way to read the story of the cheerleader and the football coach: as a narrative of decent people who had very little but whose lives improved thanks to love and goodness and hard work. Kurt Vonnegut diagrammed this basic creation myth, in which some kind of deity provides people with the things they need to survive: sunlight and water, weapons and tools and companions. This myth, he says, “is essentially a staircase, a tale of accumulation”7:
Maybe, in telling my parents’ story so often, I hoped to create a trajectory of good fortune that would extend directly into my own existence.
After my parents separated, I began dreaming about earthquakes. I’d be walking to dinner with friends and suddenly the ground would buckle and sway before splitting into wide, grinning chasms and I’d wake up in a sweat. Even in sleep, I felt untethered from the world of the safe and privileged.
I wear my mother’s wedding ring every day. It reminds me of how lucky I am to have come from such love, such optimism. When they fell in love, my parents had very little, but their marriage set them climbing on an upward staircase to a life that would give their daughters more.
The best stories offer us an ordered world: a place for everyone, a sense that things happen for a reason, the promise that suffering is never arbitrary. After all, if God or fate brought together the cheerleader and the football coach, then my life, too, was drawn in the cloth of the universe before it was cut. But the rules that govern our stories are not the forces that shape our lives. In real life, the beginning of a story rarely predicts its ending—no matter how many times you tell it.
Maybe we each need our own creation myth, some way to say to everyone else: Here is how I came to be in the world, which is really a way of saying, I belong.
coal miner’s daughter
love in context
“Mamaw got married at fifteen, and I got married at twenty,” Mom used to say to us, “so you girls can’t get married until you’re at least twenty-five. And then your daughters will have to wait until they’re thirty.”
“Thirty?!” I remember laughing at the absurdity of the suggestion. At fourteen, marriage at thirty was a punch line. Twenty-five seemed just right.
By the time I was seventeen, I’d planned out the next decade of my life in careful detail. I’d go to college and then to grad school. I’d find the man I wanted to spend my life with, but not before starting a career curating exhibitions at an art gallery in my dream city, Charleston, South Carolina. I’d live in a carriage house, saving up for an old Charleston single house downtown with side porches to catch the breeze that came in off the ocean. I’d marry at twenty-five and have my first kid by twenty-seven. It all seemed simple, possible—a decade was plenty of time in which to construct a life.
But at twenty-five I was a grad student and a barista. I couldn’t have guessed that I’d still feel so far from my idea of adulthood, and from any desire for a child or a husband. I planned to work just enough to pay the rent, and devote the rest of my time to writing a book. My intentions regarding marriage and family were vague at best: They were things I’d get around to eventually. If I had to choose between a book and a baby, I sometimes thought, I would choose the book.
But by the time I was twenty-nine and doing research for these essays, a paralyzing sense of doubt had crept in. I loved Kevin, but I knew that if we stayed together, I might never get married or have kids. I didn’t want to change my life as much as I wanted to rewind it and do the love part differently. If I could do it over, I would just pick someone whose ideas about marriage and family looked more like mine in the first place.
I sometimes thought of my seventeen-year-old self: Would she be impressed by my job teaching at a fairly prestigious university? Or disappointed by the apparent lack of progress in my personal life? Sure, I didn’t own a big house, I imagined saying to her, and yes, we had to have a roommate to pay the rent, but I was in Vancouver—in an entirely different country—and I spent my weekends skiing and rock climbing. Surely she could see there was something glamorous and adventurous about my unmarried life.
All of this was on my mind when I called my maternal grandmother, Mamaw, one afternoon, to ask her about my parents’ love story. Instead, I found myself asking her about her own marriage. I knew a few basic details: She’d been fifteen when she married my grandfather, a solider just back from World War II who was more than twice her age. They set up house in a small coal mining town and started a family.
My mom wanted me to make a life for myself before I got married—to find a city I liked and a career I loved—and I’d gladly followed that advice. But her mother, my mamaw, had gotten married before she could even drive a car, and she’d always seemed happy with that choice. I wanted to know more.
• • •
“Tell me about how you met Papaw,” I said when Mamaw answered the phone.
“Well . . .” she began. She paused. “Now let me back up a minute, honey.” This is how Mamaw tells stories, backing up before she’s begun. She doesn’t see her life as a series of anecdotes as much as a single, coherent narrative, one that begins with her mother’s death and ends with her husband’s.
Mamaw quit school in the second month of seventh grade to take care of her mother, who was sick with cancer, and her baby brother, Charles, who was two, while her father worked long hours in the coal mines. “I became a housewife at eleven years old,” she said.
&
nbsp; After her mother died, her father remarried right away. “Lily,” she said. “You know, I’d been taking care of Charles and doing all the housework and my dad’s new wife, she thought I should go on doing all that. She’d spend the day at her parents’ house just sitting on the porch, and then she’d come back late in the evening when Daddy came home from work. I was expected to have dinner ready on the table and the bathwater hot. Well, honey, I got tired of doing all that. And I decided I was gonna leave.”
She begged her uncle for money for a bus ticket to visit her grandfather—her mother’s father—in another mining town. “And when I got there, I wrote my daddy a letter telling him not to come get me.” Even at eighty she sounded defiant. I could not imagine the circumstances under which I might’ve left home at thirteen. I couldn’t have assembled a meal, much less run a home and cared for a toddler.
She walked door to door in the mining camp, asking the neighbors if they needed anyone to do laundry, ironing, cleaning, and was able to save up enough to go back home after a few months. “But I went down there for Christmas, and me and Lily had a big old fight, and that was the end of it.” She paused for dramatic effect. “So I went up to Benedict on December 29, 1944.” Here, the story begins.
Benedict was a coal camp, one of the many communities that sprang up around Appalachian mines as a way to secure reliable labor. In these self-sufficient outposts, miners and their families lived in company houses and shopped in the company store, usually with scrip—company-issued money—rather than cash. They attended the company church, and when they got sick, they saw the company doctor. Eventually many families were in debt to the company, which had a monopoly over their time and resources. Most of these thriving communities—including Benedict—disappeared when the mines closed in the second half of the twentieth century.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 5
