Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  But her mother insisted. College wouldn’t be college if Corrie couldn’t pledge a sorority, make new friends and date new boys. We’d talked it over for weeks. Corrie argued with her mother and I’d argued with Corrie. Finally we agreed to do what her mother wanted. Corrie always had to do what her mother wanted.

  I still loved her, wanted her. When she turned away from my kiss at the Burger Barn, I was hurt.

  “What’s wrong, babe?” I asked her.

  “We’ve got to talk,” she replied.

  “Okay.”

  “Get in,” she said, indicating the car.

  I glanced at the interior of the baby-blue Lincoln. “I’ll get it dirty,” I pointed out. My Sunray DX coveralls had smears of the thick black engine grease that was the daily experience of petroleum production. “And you know how your mother hates the smell of the oil patch in her car.”

  Corrie shrugged, unconcerned. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I knew that it did matter, but I wasn’t willing to argue the point.

  I opened the driver’s side door. Corrie got in and slid all the way across to the passenger’s side. I was never allowed to drive her mother’s Lincoln. And when we went in my grandmother’s car (a blue ’53 Bel Air), Corrie always sat in the middle. Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. And I wasn’t all that eager to find out what.

  I got behind the steering wheel and gazed over the vast expanse of hood between me and the front bumper. The ignition turned over easy and the powerful roar of the 460 V8 was muted in the plush interior. I loved that car. Normally I would have given my eyeteeth for a chance to drive it. But with Corrie so obviously distracted, I couldn’t even enjoy it.

  I put the automatic transmission in reverse, backed out of the parking spot and headed for the highway.

  “Let’s drive up to the river bluff,” she suggested.

  The little hill in the bend of the river was an infamous teen hangout and Lover’s Lane. This time of day it would most likely be deserted and it would offer a great view of the sunset.

  “I can’t,” I told her. “I’ve got to go home and get cleaned up. And Gram will have my dinner on the table. She’ll worry if I don’t show.”

  That last was undoubtedly true, though it was the kind of thing that I never spent a lot of time worrying about. The truth was, I didn’t want to go up to the river bluff at sunset with Corrie. It seemed exactly the kind of site that she would choose to break bad news. She had met someone else. I was sure of it. Terrified of it. We were already broken up. I could bear that, because it was her parents standing between us. If she decided that she no longer loved me…well, I wasn’t sure I could stand to hear it.

  “I really need to talk to you,” she insisted.

  “We’ll talk,” I said. “But I need to get cleaned up first.”

  I drove us into town. I was so distracted that I actually went straight up Main Street, not even having the presence of mind to avoid being seen from the front of her father’s drugstore. I went around the city park and turned left on West Hickory and drove the five black-topped blocks to my grandmother’s little two-bedroom bungalow.

  I had lived with Gram since I was four. That was the year that my mom died and my dad went away. That was the way that I always said it, “My mom died and my dad went away.” That was the truth, but as they said at Daddy’s trial it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My father shot and killed my mother in the middle of an argument on a hot summer night as I lay sleeping in my bed. He said it was an accident. The police said it was murder. The one thing everyone agreed was that my father, Floyd Braydon, was very drunk at the time. From what I’ve gathered, that wasn’t all that unusual.

  My father got twenty-five to life. I got Gram. She was widowed, almost fifty and still in shock over the loss of her youngest daughter, but she took me in. She drove all by herself down to Odessa, Texas, to pick me up at the child welfare office. I didn’t remember her. I’m not sure that we’d ever met. She walked into the building and she might as well have been a total stranger. But she loved me immediately, unconditionally. A kid couldn’t have asked for a better deal.

  I remember the caseworkers kept talking and talking. They talked about me, but nobody really talked to me. Finally Gram just took my hand.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  I didn’t realize that she meant her home in Lumkee. But I already trusted her so much that I would have followed her anywhere.

  Corrie and I didn’t say a word to each other as I drove the Lincoln. She just stared out the window with a sad, almost lost look on her face. It was over between us. I was sure of it. And my heart was already breaking.

  I pulled into the two rutted dirt tracks that served as the driveway beside Gram’s little brown shingled house. I raced around the car to open the door for Corrie. I was almost too late, she had one foot on the ground already before I could offer a hand. She gave me a little smile. It was only tiny, but it gave me hope.

  “Good manners will get you a long way in the world,” Gram had taught me.

  I hoped it would be enough to keep Corrie beside me.

  I held open the white picket gate as she went through. And then clasped her palm as we walked across the yard and up the front porch steps. The screen wasn’t latched so I opened it and stuck my head in.

  “Gram!” I called out.

  “Samuel Braydon,” she answered from the depths of the kitchen. “Don’t you be tracking through my house in those dirty work clothes!”

  “I’m not,” I assured her. “Corrie’s here with me.”

  “Corrie?” Gram’s tone changed immediately. A minute later she was walking through the living room wiping her wet hands on the hem of the apron tied around her waist. “Corrie! Get in this house, young’un. I have missed the sight of your pretty face.”

  Gram was delighted. Her eyes virtually disappeared among the wrinkles as she smiled. She was a little tiny woman, not quite five feet tall in sensible-heeled shoes. Her hair, as always, was pulled away from her face and twisted into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. Pentecostal Hair, is what Corrie called it. Gram was a Baptist, of course. But her hair, left to grow as long as it would grow and bound up tightly by day, was definitely Pentecostal.

  “What a wonderful surprise to see you,” she told Corrie. “Now, I’ve only got some nice butter beans with a bit of ham shoulder. It’s plain food, but it’s filling and we’ll dress it up with some chow-chow and some pickled beets. Would you like that? Come on in here and you can help me set an extra place. Samuel, if you don’t get yourself cleaned up, we’ll eat without you.”

  It was an empty threat, of course. But I was very willing to hand off Corrie to my grandmother. The two liked each other a lot. And I thought it might be good to remind Corrie that those guys she met at college might be smarter and richer and more her type, but they didn’t have Gram. Gram came with me. If she dumped me, she’d lose Gram as well.

  I walked back across the porch, down the steps, leaped over the picket pence and trotted around to the backyard. The old washhouse that my grandfather had built in the 1920s was still in use. Gram had her Maytag installed in the little room just off the kitchen, but she still had washtubs and a scrub board for my coveralls. I stepped inside the weathered tin-roofed shack and stripped off my clothes. I washed up with lava soap in a basin of hot water carried down from the house and rinsed in the cold water from the spigot on the wall. This was the same routine that my grandfather and my uncles had followed. Clean clothes, freshly starched and pressed, hung on the hook on the back of the door. I mixed my shaving cream in the same chipped cup my grandfather had used and brushed my teeth with his preferred Colgate tooth powder. The passage of time and changes in consumer choices had somehow passed Gram by. Either that or she saw no reason to change a system that had obviously worked. In a few minutes, I was clean and presentable. I stepped back outside and dropped the sweaty, greasy coveralls in the barrel of Gram’s special oil-field
cleaning solution that had to be kept out in the open, it’s main component being highly flammable drip gasoline.

  In the kitchen Gram and Corrie were getting dinner on the table. I knew that Corrie’s family never ate before 7:00 p.m. But Gram always fed a working man as soon as he came home from the field.

  I watched for a moment, unobserved. Corrie was helpful, soft-spoken, subdued. She’d only been at college for six weeks. In some ways it felt like yesterday, and in others, that she had been gone forever.

  “There’s our boy,” Gram said as she caught sight of me. “Come on in and take your place at the table. Corrie, you sit down as well. I’ll only be a minute until this corn bread comes out of the oven.”

  Corrie sat at my right. I smiled at her. She smiled back, but it was only a shadow of the happy expression I was accustomed to.

  When Gram was seated we joined hands around the table as I said grace. Corrie’s hand was so small in my own and it was cold. I couldn’t resist giving it an encouraging squeeze. If this was the end for us, I knew I would be sick, miserable. There was no reason that she should be sick and miserable, too.

  “Thy will be done,” I told God. But I was fervently hoping that He would see things my way.

  The meal seemed to last forever. Gram kept up a steady stream of talk, including a long-winded, oft-told tale of Aunt Kate sewing flour-sack drawers with the advertising along the back so that the butts read SHAWNEE’S BEST. It was one of Gram’s typical old-timey stories of her and her sisters growing up in Territory Days. I’d heard it a million times, I guess. But Corrie hadn’t heard it and it made her laugh. It was a wonderful sound. So I told a story or two myself. By the time Gram served up the applesauce cake the tone had changed to being almost festive.

  “Why don’t you two sit out on the porch while I clean up this little tat of dishes,” Gram said.

  Corrie argued for a minute, but Gram shooed her away and reluctantly we found ourselves alone on the porch swing. Twilight was coming on and the overhead cloud cover made it seem even darker. I didn’t switch on the porch light, but the house light seeped through the front window, giving just enough illumination for me to see Corrie’s face.

  She looked so sweet and pretty. Smart and sweet and pretty, Corrie had it all. It was no wonder that her parents wanted more for her than me. And no surprise that once she’d been out into the world, she’d discovered there were plenty of guys more suited to her.

  I knew I would never do as well. I’d find some good-natured gal and we’d buy a mobile home on a fifteen-year lease and raise three or four kids. But I would always remember Corrie. I would always remember the girl who thought better of me than I did myself.

  I pulled her close and kissed her. I wanted to taste for one last time the lips that by any reasonable accounting should never have been mine. As I moved back, I smoothed away a few strands of blondish-brown hair that strayed across her cheek.

  “Don’t be nervous or anxious or afraid,” I told her. “Just tell me whatever it is you have to tell me.”

  A worried frown still creased her brow, but she raised her chin bravely.

  “Sam, I’m pregnant.”

  I was momentarily speechless, but I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped open in shock. That disbelief was almost immediately followed by irrational anger.

  Some son-of-a-bitch college boy had knocked up my Corrie!

  Fortunately, before I could express that thought, I realized that if Corrie was telling me, then I must be the guy who’d knocked her up. Could that be true? I always used a rubber. The last time we’d done it was in August. It was October already. Is that how it worked? You did it in August and didn’t find out things had gone wrong until October? Was she sure it was true? Was she sure it was me?

  I wanted to ask her all those things, but I looked into those bright brown eyes, awash with tears, and I couldn’t play twenty questions.

  “I’m so sorry, Sam,” she apologized. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I know what to do,” I told her. “We get blood tests and a license, we say ‘I do’ and live happily ever after.”

  She didn’t look as if she appreciated my humor.

  I took her hand in my own and brought it to my lips for a kiss.

  “Marry me, Corrie,” I said.

  When she hesitated, I added, “Please.”

  Corrie

  1977

  The worst day of my life. That’s how I would have described it then. And since my life experience up to that time had been mostly pampered and sheltered, it probably was.

  I hadn’t wanted to believe that it was true. I couldn’t imagine that it could happen to me. I was smart. I was careful. I had a great future ahead of me.

  Okay, so I missed a period. Sometimes that happens. New surroundings, different foods, even a change in water might cause the body to get out of its normal rhythm.

  Finally, my roommate, a foulmouthed, chain-smoking cowgirl from Altus made me face my denials.

  “Hey,” she said angrily when I’d unintentionally awakened her. “How many mornings are you going throw up before you trot yourself over to the infirmary and pee in a cup?”

  I went that very afternoon.

  “I’m sure it’s not true,” I told the nurse, smiling. “I mean. Lots of things can mess up your cycle.”

  She made no comment about that. She put a dropper into the cup of urine and drew out just a tiny bit. She put that on a card and swished it around for maybe ten seconds.

  “Positive,” she said, no inflection in her voice.

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “You can’t know that fast.”

  She held up the card for me to see. There was a big circle and a small circle. Both of them had turned color.

  “Sometimes we get false negatives,” she said. “We never get false positives.”

  I left the building with a sense of unreality. My life had just made a terrible unexpected turn. I felt disassociated from it. I walked to the Student Union. Ate a burger on the Starlight Terrace. Talked to two of the other girls who’d pledged Tri-Delt with me. That afternoon the greatest concern of Lisa and Janice was Saturday’s game with K State.

  “You’re going to be there, right?” Lisa asked.

  “No, no, I think I have to go to Lumkee this weekend,” I said.

  “Eew, bummer,” Janice said. “Well, hurry back as quick as you can.”

  “Yeah,” Lisa said. “When I go home to Shidler, I always get this irrational fear that somehow I’m going to be trapped there.”

  We all laughed, but her fears were similar to my own.

  But I had no choice. I had to go home, because I had to tell Sam. He was the person most concerned and also the one I felt closest to. I needed someone I could trust. I needed a calm, rational discussion to consider my options.

  I could get an abortion. They were safe and legal now in Kansas. And at less than eight weeks, the procedure would be simple and quick.

  Or I could have the baby and give it up for adoption. In all honesty, I favored that idea. I imagined a happy little child, a part of me and Sam, growing up as the doted-upon only child of a loving, formerly childless family so blessed to get him. They would lavish upon our little baby everything that Sam and I had ever wanted. And they would tell him that his parents gave him up because they wanted the best for him.

  The choice I gave the least consideration to was getting married. That would mean quitting school. That would mean telling my parents. That would mean public shame. That would mean the end of my life as I had known it, as I had planned it.

  For me, wedding bells were the last and worst option.

  It was the first thing out of Sam’s mouth.

  If I’d told him out on the river bluff, like I wanted to, I think I could have said no. But in the warmth and hominess that was Gram’s house, somehow it seemed possible, it seemed almost desirable.

  “Are you sure you want to marry me?” I asked him.
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  “Of course I am,” Sam insisted. “I’ve always wanted to marry you. You know that. You know I love you.”

  “But to get married now, because of this, it just seems so wrong.”

  “Nothing has ever been so right,” he assured me.

  I don’t remember ever actually agreeing. But I was swept along by Sam’s enthusiasm.

  “Let’s go inside and tell Gram.”

  “What?” I was incredulous. “I can’t. We can’t.”

  “The longer we wait, the harder it will be,” he said. “When your direction is clear, you’ve got to move forward. We don’t want to waste time second-guessing ourselves and anticipating what might happen. Let’s get it over with.”

  Like a zombie, I followed him back into the house.

  Gram had finished washing dishes and was sitting out on her sunporch crocheting in lamplight. The banks of windows that surrounded the room on three sides were all open and the fresh night was alive with the scent of autumn. I had always associated that season with football games and pep rallies, youthful optimism and possibility. Now it just seemed decayed and melancholy.

  “Gram,” Sam said to her. “Corrie and I have some news.”

  She glanced up with a smile, but when she looked at me, her expression faltered.

  Bracing herself with a chair, she rose to her feet and gestured for us to go back to the living room.

  She sat in her overstuffed rocking chair with the lace doilies on the arms. I seated myself on the edge of the couch. Sam continued to stand, leaning his back against the wooden mantel that surrounded the gas heating stove.

  He looked at me.

  I was so scared, I was worried that I might faint. He smiled at me. He looked as if he was completely happy. He even gave me a little wink, as if to say, “Someday we’re going to look back at this and laugh.” For me it felt like no laughing matter.

  “Gram,” he said calmly, confidently, “Corrie and I are going to have a baby and we’ve decided to get married.”