The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  My father and mother paired off in high school, she told me, because they were the two smartest kids in the class. They dated others until they were juniors, when they became a serious couple. His parents were well-to-do and lived in a grand house in the best part of town. They approved of her, she told me, because she did not drink. In his teens my father already had trouble handling alcohol. She said, “I just liked Coca-Cola.” She never tasted alcohol, but this early-twentieth-century concoction of sugar, caffeine, and spent coca leaves suited her. The company has since changed the formula.

  When my unmarried parents were eighteen, my father’s wealthy family took her with them to Colorado for a chaperoned vacation. Mother loved the mountains. It was a welcome excursion she could not otherwise afford. When she and my father turned twenty, in late 1935, they eloped. This spared her parents the expense of a wedding, she told me.

  My mother never discussed her parents’ ethnicity or Grandfather’s deepening health issues, only that they were poor. One of my mother’s strongest qualities was denial. She never said anything critical about her father, only brief praise. He was patient. He was skilled at woodworking. He never raised his voice. He never ever spanked her. Despite her faint praise of her own family, she looked forward to being part of her husband’s established business family. They would move into his parents’ home, not hers.

  When I asked about her maternal grandparents in Kansas City, my mother described them in the vaguest terms. Grandfather Miller had beautiful penmanship and worked as an engraver in a department store. Grandmother Miller tended the ill daughter. My mother did not explain her later alienation from all her grandparents, what catastrophe triggered it or what gradually eroded those relationships. She lived a more and more isolated life, which began with her marriage and continued as her own relatives drifted into the background.

  After marriage my parents lived only briefly in the fine house of the wealthy in-laws. One afternoon the young brother-in-law told my mother what a nuisance she was. My mother was furious, and she insisted that they move out the same day. She vowed she would never set foot in her mother-in-law’s house again, and she did not. Again, one incident tipped the balance of pent-up resentments, and the family fractured. The in-laws, nonetheless, ruled their lives for several more years. They paid for a small house for the young family. Mother’s father-in-law insisted she quit her job in the doctor’s office. “He couldn’t let people know his son was not capable of supporting a wife,” she told me. She obeyed. Unfulfilled career plans became a major theme in her life, until she returned to college in her fifties.

  During the first days of marriage my father worked in the family grocery supply business, which meant long days trucking fruit from Texas and Arkansas. His father treated him like hired help, not a junior partner. The pay was low, and any shortcoming brought sharp criticism. After ten years my father left the family business and took a job on the Santa Fe railroad. He followed the example of his father-in-law, Grandfather Bruner, rather than his own father. The Delaware man’s influence had long-reaching effects, as my father learned to identify with workingmen, not management. Father would later turn down promotions to work as a manager.

  A more complete break with the in-laws came when my parents moved to Emporia, eighty miles away. This small town on the eastern edge of the Flint Hills was very similar to Newton. The main attraction was an established state college where they could educate their children, my mother told me. She did not mention how the conflict with in-laws played a role in their decision to put distance between them and their hometown. I see, nonetheless, my mother’s strong will at work in this important decision and that my father had acquiesced.

  They had a child immediately after marriage, Mary, and then several failed pregnancies. Six years later a boy survived, David; a girl, Jane; and then another girl (me)—all within thirteen years. My mother became immersed in the daily business of keeping a large household running, and this occupied her adulthood for thirty years, from 1936 to 1967.

  When I visited home in the late 1960s, I saw her renewal of personal goals. She completed a bachelor’s degree and started a master’s. She taught college as a teaching assistant and filled in part-time at the high school. In the summers she gardened, cooked, and met with friends. After she completed her advanced degree, in her sixties, she relaxed a bit. She had achieved an important goal, but no employment opportunity existed after she reached the mandatory retirement age, before passage of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. Even without a job, she gloried in her achievement and displayed a copy of her thesis to anyone who stopped by the house.

  Her marriage gradually became less conflicted as my father quit resisting her outside activities. They shared some political and library groups. I remember her presenting a testimonial about my father as he ended tenure as the county Democrat association chairman. She was descriptive and funny. When my father had a debilitating stroke, she nursed him until his death seven years later.

  Mother had no sense of being Native or European descended or both, in part because many of her friends were from similarly suppressed backgrounds. Eastern Kansas is a geography of mixed populations. Four reservations remain in Kansas. In Emporia, Mother’s Canadian friend Annette Vincent was peculiar because of her endearing British quirks. Mother’s other close friend, Ada Gilbert, traveled regularly to Ponca City, Oklahoma, for tribal events and expressed allegiance to her Native culture. My mother considered herself in-between: a melting-pot American. Her father’s and mother’s struggles were not her concern. Daily events filled her conversation as she talked compulsively whenever she could find an audience.

  However much she ignored her family past, she was a result of generations before her. I remember how, as she conversed, descriptive gestures accompanied her commentary, similar to those of many Native people I know. “Tie a Kiowa woman’s hands behind her back, and she can’t talk,” my friend Jennie once said. My husband wrote an article about the hand signs the Menominee sawmill workers developed, so signing continues to be part of that Algonquian nation’s rhetorical style. But as a girl, I remember being embarrassed when my mother pantomimed so much of her conversation, unlike the more reserved neighborhood mothers. These were not emphatic stabs in the air. She sat with legs even, so her thighs created a table, and then she drew air pictures. People of many ethnicities gesture as they speak, but Mother’s signing was not for emphasis, nor did she use commonplace gestures like a “thumbs up.” Her brother also had this speaking style, so it appears their father taught his children implicit lessons, including a manner of presenting a conversation. Mother talked, with her gestures, about aphids on the roses or summer rains or sewing projects. She did not consider a conversation complete without her improvised hand motions.

  My mother saw her parents less and less frequently. She had my father’s problems to face every day, and avoiding another set of family issues simplified her life. She hosted her husband’s elderly grandmother a few times, and I remember meeting this sweet-faced, gentle woman who smelled of face powder. Annual visits from my father’s parents were tense occasions. Otherwise, few outsiders visited. All four of Mother’s grandparents, who had been so delighted to see a little girl born in 1915, were forgotten, even though they lived into their eighties. It was as if they had never existed. She wrapped the wedding quilt her Delaware grandmother Charlotte had made in sheets and put it in a closet out of sight.

  *

  From the first my mother and I were no match. Ironically, she loved images of the Madonna, so knickknacks of Mary with baby Jesus jumbled among magazines on end tables in the living room. Never did I live up to her expectations. She wanted me to be blonde, curly-haired, and bubbly, like my father’s British Isles, Cherokee, and German family, but in 1949 I was born with straight black hair and blue-brown eyes, like her Bruner relatives. After six weeks, perhaps in an effort to please her, my hair turned wavy and light brown or dark blonde—dishwater blonde was the family term. My e
yes turned muddy brown. My straight-haired eldest sister told me about burning permanents all her childhood, as our mother tried to make her resemble Shirley Temple. With natural curls I was spared that fate, but my eyes were not the desired blue, and my hair was “brunette.” Somehow I knew these features were less desirable.

  Our mother often became enraged at me and my siblings. Early on I felt the whack of her yardstick like a puppy in a litter. Years later she would tell me how her own father had never laid a hand on her, how he would take her roller skates and put them up high as punishment, how he explained everything very patiently. She never seemed to notice the non sequitur, the contrast between her upbringing and the way she punished her own children. She raged, like winter storms blew through our wood frame house. Her frustrations were unconscious forces, turned into thunderbolts that could strike without warning. Details of her subliminal traumas are missing, but the results were dramatically visible.

  For me her temper was a fundamental fact of life, incomprehensible until I learned undercurrents of the family history. She talked once about being called “Frenchie” at school because of her “olive complexion,” as she described herself. This was all she would say. I asked if she were Indian once, but her curly hair, she explained, made it clear that she was not. She thought her father might be, but her identity, in her mind, was a separate matter. Her parents were poor, and marrying well, in her mind, had changed her identity.

  Unexpectedly, her husband’s family fortunes changed for the worse. She found herself no better off than her mother, with tasks of cooking, dishwashing, and cleaning. She cranked endless piles of laundry in the manual washing machine. Money was tight, and there was no car. She was trapped.

  Mother displayed double personalities. She was pleasant and chatty for the neighbor at the door. As soon as the door shut, though, she snarled at me. Even when she seemed calm, I knew it would not last. As a child, when she yelled or yanked my tangled hair into braids, I pulled within myself. I found succor in relationships with my three older siblings. We resisted our mother’s rule in an unspoken conspiracy. The sibling relationships were paramount, as my mother taught us, but this had unexpected consequences for her as we banded together. She was outside our circle.

  My older sister Mary cooked with me, sang, played games, and called me her “little monkey.” Every Saturday she listened to opera on the radio and baked pies while I “helped.” She was the mother-sister I adored. My brother taught me wrestling moves, knife throwing, cards, and rules for football. Sometimes he persuaded me to clean his room so our mother would not unleash her anger, and I did whatever he said, even performing hated chores. Once when Mother struck him with a hairbrush, I ran at her with my fists flailing. I could not stand to see my brother hurt. This one time she thought I was cute and laughed. I felt a child’s sense of justice and great relief.

  My other sister, Jane, just three years older, stayed with me morning to night, as we avoided our mother. We played dolls and house and jacks and jump rope. When we were old enough, we read novels and discussed adventures of Little Women. We talked about when we would be famous writers ourselves, like authors of our favorite books. We both have enjoyed writing as a vocation. She was an invaluable companion, except during my long, solitary rambles outside.

  Another comfort was my father’s library: brightly colored children’s books, Reader’s Digest books, Asian philosophy (Tibetan Book of the Dead and yoga), fantasy (Conan, Tarzan), Mari Sandoz’s biography of Crazy Horse, Nancy Drew mysteries, science fiction, history (C. W. Ceram, Will Durant), nature (Rachel Carson and Thor Heyerdahl), and every other genre. I discovered that sweet trance induced by good writing. These were my escape from household tensions, an obsession as compelling as any other addiction. Perhaps books saved me from having much interest in alcohol. Others went to high school “beer busts” in the country where kegs were available, but for me books were the best distraction.

  One night I read Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for hours before my mother caught me. However she upbraided me, she could not take away my profound pleasure in those blissful hours. Like Tarzan, who navigated a violent jungle and survived surly gorillas, I maneuvered the hazards of my household and vested my emotions in the playacting of fiction. Reading and then writing were assertions of my separate identity. Gregory Orr writes about the healing role of literature, its ability to keep overwhelming emotions at a safe distance: “Survival begins when we ‘translate’ our crisis into language—where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it.” Binge reading helped me buffer the tensions between me and my mother. My beloved siblings and a shelf of books helped me survive well enough. My mother was a necessary hazard, like a busy street or a snowstorm. She led a very consistent life, and I appreciate that security. Bedtime was always nine o’clock. She enforced that rule like all the others, firmly and without any show of affection.

  Once we talked indirectly about her aloofness. She described it in terms of her own father, how he had not made a show of his feelings. It was not in his character to make superficial assurances, she explained. His actions demonstrated his love for his family. She concluded by saying she had married a man like her father, who also did not make a great show of his feelings but, instead, demonstrated reliability. This was as close as she came to explaining her own undemonstrative nature.

  In addition to other pressures, my mother must have had very mixed feelings about gender roles. Her family had taught her to be an active, assertive woman, in keeping with Native expectations. At school she received higher grades than most of the boys in her class. As she grew up, she saw them take leadership roles, while she had few choices of vocation, and it galled her. History was her passion, something her father discussed with her as easily as the weather. This was not considered ladylike in those days. After Mother finally returned to college, years before the term “nontraditional” student was being used, she majored in one of the accepted fields for women—home economics. Her master’s thesis, though, was a history of costume design. It was as close as she could come to her preferred field of study.

  During these post–World War II times Rosie the Riveter was no longer a woman’s role model. Doris Day movies revised women’s roles into homemakers. Gender roles were still somewhat fluid in rural areas outside of town. In the Flint Hills of Kansas farmwork demanded participation of all family members. Many women tended cattle and drove farming machinery. Some assisted with huge meals for harvesting crews. Most could ride horses and shoot stray rattlesnakes that might wander onto the porch. Stories of regional characters such as Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane were historic proof of women’s abilities. Delaware tribal member Lynette Perry describes the gender roles of rural Native women when she remembers her mother, “Mama was the daughter of a time and place that held Annie Oakley to be a model woman, and she could shoot a gun and ride a horse with the best of them.” In the country women worked alongside men, but in town occupations were more strictly divided into men’s work and women’s work, with exceptions. In Emporia women’s rights quickly made inroads in the 1960s. A woman joined the men’s garden club, and the men made room for her. An African American woman became an administrator at the local college.

  My father gloomily predicted social disaster in the 1970s as women “abandoned their children” for jobs. He grumbled that other German fathers—he considered himself German only—were absolute dictators in their homes, so why wasn’t he? He could not, in any way, stop my mother’s stubborn oppositions. When he refused to invest in a stone patio, she did the heavy landscaping work herself. She twisted a red bandana around her forehead and went to the country to find stones. These she lifted into the car trunk, transported home, and stacked. Then she dug out the entire patio area, laid a bed of sand, and fitted the stones together. In her seventies she still painted the house and fence.

  Her father had taught her carpentry, so Mother did house repairs. We moved t
o a new house when I was five, a California ranch house not quite large enough for a family of six, but it was owned, not rented. My mother decided to construct cedar shelves into her closet, so she wrote to her father for help. He traveled from Newton and stayed a week. He built my mother a miter box, which became one of her prized possessions. As they worked together, never did I consider it odd for a woman to be carrying lumber or pounding nails. My father stepped back and watched. He provided income with his job, and the house was her domain.

  Unconsciously, I followed my mother’s example and developed independence outside women’s roles. When I could drive a car legally at age fourteen, I did errands and eventually had a job as a mail carrier one summer. I cruised country roads and learned to enjoy the open expanses.

  Despite the tensions in our family, the countryside was amazing. The Flint Hills have never been plowed; they are 80 percent of the remaining tallgrass prairie in the world. In my early teens I often biked to the Neosho River dam, about two miles away, and spent happy hours sifting through crinoid fossils, broken arrowheads, and gravel. History worked its way to the surface of the ground every time it rained, so I became curious about geology.

  The Flint Hills edged our town, where our house was. Throughout the seasons about two hundred different kinds of wildflowers bloomed. Bird families teemed in our backyard. My knowledge of natural interconnections comes from the flora and fauna that grew around me in those years. I watched watercress grow in lime-green pads around the front porch drainpipe, where sun never touched. Sunsets smeared the sky with cerise or tangerine or orchid. Winter skies were delicate lemons and grays. In this Willa Cather grassland I learned awe. Navajo people have a saying, “The Earth is a mother,” and like them, I believe this is a literal truth. I cannot imagine my life without those years of healing interaction with wildflowers, sky, and free space. I went outdoors every day, and that was the time when I felt loved by something larger than any human mother.