by Pamela Morsi
I left feeling queasy and nervous, but Trixie reassured me the next day.
“Mrs. Davis hardly ever comes in here,” she said. “They live in one of those big old mansions near Swan Lake. Most days the farthest she ventures out is to shop at Miss Jackson’s in Utica Square. Just stay out of her way. She may never forgive you or forget it, but she’ll not bother to do anything about it.”
I hoped Trixie was right, and as the weeks passed I got back into my routine and forgot all about my brush with the owner.
One afternoon, when I was feeling especially creative, I broached the subject of the preschool classroom’s boring decor with Clarissa.
“I don’t understand why all the group areas in day care are so bright and colorful and we have to work in the big, drab void.”
Clarissa glanced up, surprised.
“It’s my fault,” she said, very quietly, defensively. “The teachers are responsible for the decoration of their area. I just…well, I couldn’t decide what to do and I’m not very…well, artistic. So I just never got around to doing anything.”
“Would you let me decorate it?” I asked her.
She sighed with relief. “Oh, would you!” she said. “I’ve been so afraid that somebody was going to say something. I kept thinking I should do something, because you can see right in here and it looks so…so unfinished. But I thought if I did something, somebody might not like it.”
“Don’t worry about it anymore,” I told her. “I’ll come up with something. Something that we’ll both like perfectly.”
My plans for the room didn’t come together that day or even that week. I let my ideas simmer in the back of my mind. I wanted more than just some paint and pictures on the wall. I wanted a theme that would inspire the students, enliven us as teachers and yet fit into the class image that we had already formulated for ourselves.
I was lying in bed with Sam, who was watching Jay Leno, his favorite comedian, guest host for Johnny Carson. I’m not sure if it was something Leno said, or just that all my musing finally came together. But it suddenly hit me.
“Fishbowl!”
“What?” Sam looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“That classroom is a fishbowl,” I told him. “So that’s how I’m going to decorate it.”
Having no money proved to be as much a help as a hindrance. I went through leftover paint cans at my house and at my mom’s. I even had Clarissa show up with hers. We had about four different kinds of blue. I thought about mixing them and then decided that the best was just to go from light to dark, as if we were in the ocean. The floor was perfect. Its tan carpet was the exact color of sand. I scrounged through Lauren’s stuffed animal collection for sea creatures. I looked through books on the oceans and painted the lower walls with undersea flora and fauna. I dabbed our bookshelves with wood putty and painted them as pink as a coral reef. Driving home one afternoon, I’d seen a huge pile of pallets used for hauling cement to well sites left as scrap. I loaded up the trunk and used the lumber to make shell-like fronts for the desks. The students, with the help of Clarissa and I, made fish of every kind and color, which I suspended from the ceiling, at a height unreachable by even a student standing on a desk. I even drew a snorkeler on the top of the water above us, peering down through his swim goggles at us.
The kids loved it. Clarissa loved it. The parents were delighted. The other teachers got excited about their own areas and began brainstorming with me about how they could liven things up. Trixie even showed up one morning with a colorful découpaged sign for the door that read: Preschool Fish Bowl.
Two short weeks after completion, Mrs. Davis showed up. Took one look at my handiwork and fired me on the spot.
“You’ve vandalized my building,” she told me. “It will cost me hundreds of dollars to have that monstrosity cleaned off the walls and the furniture. I’m taking that out of the pay that I owe you.”
I begged and pleaded, I cried. Finally she agreed that if I would spend the weekend repainting the walls white at my expense and cart out every piece of fishbowl decoration that we had made, then I could leave with my paycheck intact and two weeks’ severance.
I thought of my husband, my children, our checkbook. I didn’t have any other choice.
Sam went to paint it on Saturday morning. He told me just to stay home with the kids.
“This is something I can do to help,” he told me. “Just stay home, rest up, spend some time with the kids. I’ll take care of it.”
I thanked him and watched him leave. I was so disheartened. But I tried to be strong. I tried not to think of the kids I’d become attached to and would never see again, or the wonderful classroom that was about to be destroyed.
Sam returned less than two hours later.
He handed me a disposable camera. “I took some photos for you,” he said.
“Thanks,” I told him. “I didn’t expect you so soon. You really got it done quickly.”
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
“What?”
“I didn’t do it,” he repeated. “I left it exactly like it was.”
“But Mrs. Davis—”
“To hell with Mrs. Davis,” Sam said. “Corrie, that was the neatest, coolest classroom I’ve ever seen in my life. Painting over it would have been like…like painting over the Mona Lisa. If Davis wants to paint it over, she can do it. I won’t. Besides, it gives the kids a few more days to enjoy it.”
“But the money,” I said.
Sam waved my concern away. “There’re some things a guy just won’t do for money,” he said. “And destroying something fabulous that his wife created, well, that’s one of them.”
Sam
1988
In some ways, losing the business was just one tremendous relief. By the sheer force of my own will, I had been trying to keep things together. The stress had been overwhelming. Just the finality of knowing that there wasn’t anything else I could do was a kind of reassurance. And I got Corrie back. From the moment I told her that it was all over, she became my partner again. The trouble rejuvenated her in a way that the antidepressants hadn’t.
After her time at Candy Cane School, I encouraged her to think about going back to college. At first she acted as if I’d lost my mind. With no money and no jobs, it didn’t seem to her like the time to be thinking about making education expenditures.
“Take a couple of classes,” I told her. “We can get them paid for with a Pell Grant. All it will really cost us is your time. And it seems to me with both of us out of work, there’s a lot of free time available.”
So she started driving into the city three days a week to go to Tulsa Junior College. She loved it.
My situation was not as hopeful. With oil companies maintaining a hiring freeze and a hundred men applying for every job that came up, I became less certain about my future. My skills were no longer in demand. And the high school equivalency I got in the army was not considered sufficient education for even the most menial jobs.
“I’ve got petroleum engineers flipping hamburgers,” one fast-food manager told me.
“If you’re interested in getting a job,” a guy at the employment office told me, “then you should pack your bags and get out of here. All over the rest of the U.S. the economy is booming. People are getting rich. But living here is like being stuck in a Third World country. No matter how hard you work, there just isn’t anything to work with.”
I thought about leaving. I heard guys on Main Street talking about Atlanta, Seattle. There were jobs in those places. They were screaming for hardworking guys like us.
I even talked to Corrie about it. Her pretty little brow furrowed.
“If that’s what you want, Sam,” she said. “Then I’m with you. But I think we really need to think about the whole picture. Here we’ve got a place to live and my family to fall back on, if we need to. Out there…well, we’ll just be out there.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
“An
d think of all the Michigan folks,” she said.
The so-called Michigan folks had come to Oklahoma during the 1970s when the automobile industry started closing plants and laying people off. They’d left their families and friends to come for jobs in the oil patch. By and large, they didn’t seem to like it much. Michigan folks earned such a reputation for complaining about Oklahoma that among natives a new slang phrase was coined. When something was messed up, screwed up or fouled up, we’d say, “I’ll bet this is not how they do it in Michigan.”
“What about the Michigan folks?” I asked her.
“They gave up on where they lived and came down here and tried to start over,” she said. “Now, after spending a decade trying to settle in here, they’re back in their cars headed elsewhere. Is that what we want for ourselves? Is that what we want for our kids? Just new-wave Joads looking for the next crop of grapes?”
It wasn’t what I wanted.
But what I wanted wasn’t about to come to pass. I wanted to turn the clock back ten years and make things turn out differently. How exactly, I wasn’t sure.
For the time being, I could only do what I could do. I got up early every morning. I kept the house, the yard, the car, in tip-top shape. I was more involved in the children’s lives than I’d ever thought possible. I assigned their chores, checked their homework, coached their soccer teams. When I got the near-hysterical phone call from Lauren, I scrounged through the secret caverns of unmentionable stuff under the bathroom sink. Carried emergency supplies up to the school, dried her tears and assured her that being the first girl in the fifth grade to get her period didn’t make her a freak, it made her a woman.
All this while constantly looking for work, taking every low-paying labor job I could find, and fending off my son’s incessant teasing about being Mr. Mom.
Nate was still very much Paw-Paw’s boy. My relationship with my father continued to be little more than a nod in passing. He continued to live with Cherry Dale and had been unable to find work. His days were spent touring the local beer joints, and rumors about bruises on Cherry Dale circulated with growing frequency. I tried to convince myself that it was more gossip than fact.
Dad told me he planned to sell Gram’s house. Fortunately with the flood of real estate on the market, there weren’t any buyers. In my daydreaming moments I fantasized about buying it but, of course, I would never have done that. I had given the house away for nothing. Well, technically, the agreement read one dollar and other considerations. But I hardly remembered any discussion with Dad about it, I couldn’t even recall my thinking process. But I did sign the papers with no reservations at the time.
“Everything happens for a purpose,” Gram had always told me. “Sometimes we don’t like what happens and don’t understand the purpose, but that don’t mean it’s not there.”
I suppose if there was a purpose in me handing over that house, it must have been to allow me to recognize Floyd Braydon for the man that he was. It seemed like a high price to pay for seeing the light. Or maybe it was seeing past the light, the blinding glare of wanting a dad kept me from seeing the truth about the man who fathered me.
I wanted to protect my son from the same lack of vision. But it was an impossible task. It was hard to figure out where Nate’s idolization of his paw-paw had come from. He didn’t suffer from the lack of a father figure like I had. His own real, biological dad, me, had been in his life always. Maybe we weren’t as close as some father/son teams, but we got along okay. And I had been, and continued to be, a permanent person in his life.
Then there was Corrie’s dad. Doc Maynard was, in my estimation, about as perfect a grandpa as a guy could have. He was smart, hardworking, easygoing and had a great sense of humor. He was an upstanding citizen with a prosperous business. He also liked to read and fish and play golf. I admired him tremendously. And he was crazy about Nate. But Nate far preferred braggart, foul-mouthed, ex-convict Paw-Paw. I tried to limit their time together as much as possible.
Which wasn’t all that difficult. For all that the city limits of Tulsa were encroaching down Main Street, Lumkee was still a very small town and everybody knew what everybody else was doing.
Except, of course, for my brother-in-law, Mike.
Corrie’s brother had invested in my business. The money had been a big boost when it came. It had freed up my own cash so that I could afford to buy a house for my family. I’d just begun to pay him dividends when the oil patch turned sour. Now his investment was down the tubes with mine. It had happened to a lot of folks. And I was sure that Mike had interest in other local companies besides mine. But we were family and that made everything different. In a big corporation, if some anonymous stockholder loses their life savings, you send them a form letter. In a small family business, when your brother-in-law loses so much as a nickel, you owe him an explanation.
Mike had lost more than a nickel.
I wanted to talk to him privately, away from the drugstore. But it was very hard to catch him. I went by his house dozens of times and never found him at home. I eventually realized that he was leaving work, driving straight to Tulsa and not coming back until the next morning.
That was none of my business. Ultimately, I just called up and tried to make an appointment to meet with him. He put me off two or three times. When I persisted, he finally agreed to see me and then canceled at the last minute. The more he avoided me, the worse I felt and the more insistent I was on seeing him. He was Corrie’s only brother. They were very close. I couldn’t allow anything that I had done, any mistakes that I had made, to put a damper on that.
Finally we met for dinner one Tuesday evening. He suggested Gambling Steaks, a place out by the entrance ramp to the expressway. It had been a really popular place just a couple of years earlier. It was fixed up to look like a casino with lots of flashing lights and a salad bar set up on a craps table. It still looked good and I heard it served great food, but the owner had apparently lost this restaurant wager. There was a foreclosure notice on the front door and a sign on the marquee that read Last Big Week!
Mike ordered a steak. I just asked for coffee. The waitress gave me an exasperated look, but I didn’t have a spare twenty to put down on a meal. And if I ordered something, Mike would probably try to pick up the check. With what I owed him already, I couldn’t stomach that.
He was nervous, fidgety.
I assumed that he was as concerned as I was about the danger of this financial loss causing hard feelings in the family.
I took a deep breath and calmly began my presentation of the facts. I tried to put what had happened in the industry within a historical perspective. I tried to be very honest about how the business had been set up, assumptions that I had made and problems that I had not foreseen. Enough time had passed that I knew he was aware of how dire the situation had become. I didn’t delude myself that the loss was minimal to him. The price of crude had fallen on Wall Street, but ultimately it was Main Street where the crash was felt. If people in Lumkee didn’t have jobs, then they didn’t pay their bills, they didn’t buy their drugs. I wanted Mike to know that I understood that. That I was aware of his own financial balancing act.
I’m not sure when I realized that he didn’t seem to be paying much attention. But I suddenly knew that he wasn’t. He was sitting there, politely, looking in my direction, but his eyes were completely glazed over as if he were a million miles away.
My initial reaction was to be annoyed. Here I was leveling with him in a totally honest and self-condemning way and he wasn’t even listening.
Fortunately, I reminded myself that I was the one in the wrong and I was probably boring him to death with my explanations. I immediately moved to the summation.
“I take full responsibility for this debt, Mike,” I told him. “I know that it legally falls into the bankruptcy with everything else. But it is personal to me and I give you my word, I will eventually pay you back, but it may be years, even decades in the future.”
I stopped talking and just sat there. He was looking at me closely. I had no idea what was going through his mind, what he thought about my promise. Finally he spoke, and I was more confused than ever.
“I don’t care about the money,” he said. “Forget about it. It’s not important.”
“It’s important to me,” I began.
He waved my words away. “Sam, I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
He hesitated. I thought maybe my response had been wrong.
“I’ll do anything you ask, Mike,” I assured him.
“I need…”
He hesitated again. He just kept looking at me so intensely.
“I need…” He stopped again, this time he shook his head. He jerked his wallet out of his back pocket and threw a couple of bills on the table. “I need you to eat the steak that I’ve ordered,” he said. “Don’t worry about owing me anything. Take care of your wife and kids, that’s all the payback I’ll ever want.”
He got up to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t…I don’t feel like eating,” he said. “Please, eat the steak.”
Stunned, I watched him walk across the room and out the door. I jumped up and hurried after him. I didn’t know what was happening, but I couldn’t just let him go.
“Mike!” I called out to him as soon as I got outside.
He was almost at his car. He glanced back but kept going. I broke into a run.
“Mike! Wait!”
I was a few feet away when he turned toward me. I came to a halt and waited. He leaned against the car as if he was too tired to stand up.
“Mike, what’s going on?”
He raised his chin and looked me in the eye.
“I have AIDS,” he said.
I just stood there staring at him. Until that moment, all that I had known about him, I didn’t really know. And suddenly, everything that I’d ever known or wondered or suspected about him made perfect sense.
