Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  Now when I opened my eyes, Charles shared the bedroom I’d slept in since I was seven, its walls plastered with pictures of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. His large frame almost swallowed the small bed. On the weekends, Charles and I spent the night at his family’s house in his childhood bedroom, his younger brother and sister following us around and staring at us like we were aliens from Mars who’d landed in the cornfield.

  After we married, I went back to school. The only difference in my routine was that when I came home in the afternoons, I joined Charles, my father, and his uncles to help finish the house Charles was building for us. I completed my homework later in the evening, when it was too dark to work.

  That April, the day I turned eighteen, we moved into our unfinished house. My mother rocked in her chair on the front porch and cried. Her tears took me by surprise. It was one of the few times I’d seen her cry. After all that fussing over the years, my mother didn’t want me to leave. And when I did, she’d expected me to move a stone’s throw from her like she did with Papa. I looked around one last time. The path I cut through the woods to Louise’s house would soon be overgrown with wisteria and sumac vines. I recalled how Louise and I used to make a game of throwing cotton bolls at each other when no one was looking. I thought about how much I’d miss my father, who loved to make a special treat of any occasion. Those trips to town on Saturday, he looked like a king dressed in his best suit and one of his dark felt hats. Before we left, he always slipped me a quarter to buy an Archie comic book and a Hershey bar at Watson’s Drugstore. I wondered what happened to the miniature doll bed he made me from apple crates—the one I used to stuff Buzz into—that Christmas Mama said there wasn’t any money for presents.

  As I loaded my few belongings into Charles’s car, my eyes rested on Papa’s house across the road. He was one person I wouldn’t miss.

  Driving away, passing fields that would be ready for planting soon, Charles held the steering wheel, his arms taut from years of farmwork and the last months framing our house. As I clasped the box holding Granny Mac’s fragile teacup set in my lap, I wanted to grab Charles’s arm and stop the car.

  THE MORNING Charles laid down the law, I sat on our bed in our bedroom, fully dressed and ready for school, my stomach clenched with anxiety. Charles was still in the kitchen finishing the ham and biscuits I’d made for us before he set out for work and dropped me off at school on his way. I hadn’t eaten a bite.

  Now I looked out the window at the dirt Charles had prepared for my flower garden. When I’d reminded him about the senior trip that morning at breakfast, he acted surprised. My trip was only two weeks away, and then there was graduation. I wanted to be with the friends I’d spent my childhood with before we went our separate ways.

  “But you’ve known all along I wanted to go,” I’d insisted. Mrs. Self’s school trips were famous. I’d looked forward all year to seeing the White House and New York City.

  “It’s not a good idea,” he’d said without emotion.

  I could feel that familiar anger well up in me. It may have been his law, but it sure wasn’t mine. I’d worked hard for that trip. For weeks my father had driven me up every back road in Calhoun County to sell the second-most magazine subscriptions in my high school so that I could afford to go. I’d told Charles months earlier that I was going. Over breakfast, as he tried his best to eat his food while it was still hot, we went back and forth until, exasperated, he finally said, “You’re married now. Married people don’t go on trips alone.”

  He meant married women. Surely, he wasn’t worried about the rowdy boys in my class who drove across the state line to buy liquor in Georgia every weekend. I suspected they’d misbehave as usual on the trip, but that had nothing to do with me. I remembered that Charles had made sure that I was indifferent when he made me throw out a silly necklace one of them had given me a long time ago. I sighed as the morning light streamed through the window, a strange contrast to my dark mood. Charles clearly expected me to be a “good wife,” and that meant I was to stay at home where I belonged.

  But this wasn’t one of our ordinary squabbles over blankets or thermostats. I hated the way, in the middle of the night, Charles, fast asleep, jerked the blankets to his side of the bed, leaving me with one thin sheet, shivering. It killed me when he changed the thermostat behind my back; he insisted on keeping it at 65 degrees, practically freezing me to death. Now I really felt left out in the cold. I so wanted to find a way through this. I thought and thought as I smoothed the bedspread over and over again, knowing I’d be late for school and Charles for work. And it hurt even more because I had to admit to myself that Mama was right this time. She’d told me when we were shopping for my wedding dress that Charles would never let me go on the trip. I didn’t believe her—why did he have to let me, anyway? I’d read the Good Housekeeping advice at Mrs. Gray’s house—that a good wife didn’t question her husband’s judgment because he is master of the house—but that wasn’t supposed to apply to me. Daddy had never told my mother what to do. And I felt like I could almost always get my way with him. If Daddy had nothing but a dollar left in his pocket and I wanted a steak, he’d buy it.

  I called to mind the time I was determined to have a coat my mother refused to buy. One late afternoon right before my father left for work, I’d found him in the living room flipping through one of my comic books. Dressed in his denim pants and the white work shirt Mama starched as stiff as barn wood, he smelled like diesel fuel, a smell I’d almost come to like.

  I sidled up next to him and asked him if he’d get me that coat I’d been talking about. He kept his money folded neatly in his pocket. He didn’t look up but turned the page, the palm of his hands calloused as hard as a butternut in places, the whites of his fingernails stained an indelible black from engine grease.

  “Sugar, if you want that coat, I’ll get you that coat.”

  It was August and hot as blue blazes outside, but I wore that coat every day. Mama was so mad that, for months, every time I turned around I found myself with more chores to do.

  I got up from the bed at last and opened my closet door to look for that coat. Did I have any say-so in this relationship? Feeling the thick brown wool, I knew that even though I had my own money for the trip, I wasn’t in control of my life. Our ideas about marriage, specifically what it meant to be a wife, were as diametrically opposed as two magnets facing each other the wrong way. Suddenly I felt like a fool. I should have known that our different backgrounds would come between us. Religion and the traditional values that accompanied it loomed large in Charles’s family. He often reminisced about the Sunday picnics after church when the old folks gathered to gossip while the young folks played horseshoes the whole afternoon. His sister would tell how when they’d be sitting on the porch on Sundays and the preacher came by, Charles ran around slinging all the dirty dishes into the stove and stuffing the dirty clothes into the wringer washing machine.

  Charles’s best memories centered on the church, his second home. My main memory of church was Mama complaining the few times we went about the reverend dipping into the church offerings to pay for his gas. And she had absolutely no patience for those snake-handling preachers.

  Still in my bedroom a half hour later, I just couldn’t let go of that coat. I didn’t want to see Charles, never mind ride with him all the way to school. I knew he was patiently waiting for me, probably hoping I’d accept his decision if only he gave me time. He’d been clear that it was his decision to make. As he sat at our brand-new kitchen table, Charles had flat-out insisted, “If you loved me, you’d stay home.”

  His eyes had widened in disbelief when I said, “If you loved me, you’d let me go.”

  As I took my treasured coat out of our closet, I knew I was going to Washington no matter what Charles said or how upset he was. It was way too hot to wear that coat on a sunny spring day, but it was my shield, as it had been with my mother many springs earlier. I put it on, ready to go to school, my blood stil
l burning. In the car, Charles reminded me that a husband cleaves unto his wife; they become one flesh.

  Now I understood the true meaning of my wedding sermon. When the preacher had said that the marriage would come first, he’d meant Charles would, and there’d be a price to pay if I didn’t submit.

  I had only been in Washington one day when I called Charles at GE on the pay phone to check in. A coworker answered and told me Charles was on his way to the hospital in an ambulance; no one knew what had happened. I thought that maybe he’d had a heart attack, so I took the next train home.

  At the time, Charles was running tubes in the furnace room, where it’s so hot you’re supposed to take salt tablets to keep from becoming dehydrated. Charles hadn’t taken them that day, nor had he drunk enough water. But he wouldn’t admit he’d gotten dehydrated on purpose. I knew in my gut that he’d done so in order to get me to come home early.

  It took a long time for me to get over his stunt, and I wished a thousand times I hadn’t come home. I had always known that there’s one thing I hated more than anything else: being told that I couldn’t do something. Now I knew what was second on my list: being tricked and manipulated. In our first few months of marriage, Charles had crossed both lines.

  NOT LONG after that, we argued over the hospital bill that we had to spend what was left of my trip money to pay. Night after night, while he read his Bible, I pretended to sleep, not wanting to talk or kiss him good night. I was stiff with anger. I felt as if my heart had closed.

  One night, after about a week of this, I pulled the covers over my head extra hard and asked roughly when he was going to turn the light out.

  He sighed. That irritated me even more. Finally, I heard him put his Bible on his bedside table, where he always left it. The room became quiet. We lay in silence, the only sound the cicadas’ crescendo outside our window. I thought about my uncle who’d told everyone we’d be separated in a year. I could feel sadness creeping in, softening me. I didn’t know how this was ever going to be resolved, but I was tired of being mad.

  Charles pulled the covers from my face and leaned into me. I didn’t push him away. We found each other again in the dark.

  “I don’t want you to be upset anymore. I don’t want to lose my best friend,” he whispered later.

  Before we fell asleep, we promised we’d always talk through our troubles whenever we disagreed. Throughout our marriage, this pact served us well. After that night, no matter how angry we got with each other, one of us would back down and end the argument by reminding the other that we were best friends.

  I began to realize that no one’s marriage is perfect; you just make the best marriage possible. My senior trip wasn’t the first or last time Charles got into his religious mode, thinking he was lord and master and forgetting that I was a real person. But I knew Charles loved me like no one else.

  TOWARD THE end of my senior year, I interviewed at General Electric, where Charles worked. The Monday after graduation Charles and I drove to his friend’s house, where we carpooled with him and some other guys sixteen miles into the small town of Oxford. I clocked in at GE, thinking the sooner I started working, the sooner we’d be able to put a little more distance between us and the life I so wanted to leave behind. I was going to be like Aunt Robbie, who like many women during World War II had been hired in at Goodyear while the men were fighting the war.

  As one of the younger women at GE, I tended to keep to myself. The older, more experienced women worked the upper end of the conveyor belt. Down at my end of the line, we put the finishing touches on the tubes made for televisions and radios. All the women dressed in white uniforms, so we could spot any debris that might corrupt the tubes.

  Operating the foot pedal, I welded together two threadlike filaments. With hundreds of tubes coming down the line, no one had time to talk. You could only go to the restroom during a break. At first, I felt like that episode of I Love Lucy where she’s working in the chocolate factory and the belt speeds up so fast she has to stuff her mouth and hat and brassiere with chocolate drops. We couldn’t stuff our bras with scrap material, but before we left the plant, management would rifle through the aspirin and lipstick in our purses, looking for pieces of scrap.

  At first, my foot hammered the pedal too hard and I generated too much scrap. Even after I got the hang of it, the machine would get too hot, scorching the filament. But I learned to block out my surroundings and focus on lightly tapping the pedal. There was nothing I could do about the machine’s temperature.

  We were paid by the piece and given a bonus after we made a certain number of tubes. When we exceeded the production numbers, we were quickly broken up, our synchronicity scattered, so that we wouldn’t have to be paid extra. But when it came to the men there, often the women worked against themselves, acting as ridiculous as schoolgirls. I was glad I was married and not caught up in all that nonsense.

  One supervisor had a bad habit of choosing one woman at a time to pick on. When he came around to picking at me, I got so frustrated that I actually started looking for another job, interviewing at Sears and the nearby hospital. When I realized I could make $40 a week somewhere else, or hang in there and keep making $150, I decided to tough it out. I refused to be run off. So I kept earning my paycheck, saving for a new dining room suite we’d put on layaway.

  AFTER ABOUT a year of working, Charles, who had joined the National Guard, was stationed at Fort Belvoir right outside Washington, D.C., for six months. I wanted to take a week off to go see him. At my age now, I know six months isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things, but back then I missed Charles so much it felt like a part of me had been amputated. When I put in my request, the foreman said no. We usually got vacation time in July, when the plant shut down, or around Christmas, when production slowed, so my union representative said there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  I told the foreman I was going anyway and he’d see me the following week. I really expected to be fired, but I knew I could find a job somewhere else, with more responsibility and better treatment, just less pay. I was willing to take that risk.

  The night my father drove Sandra and me to the Atlanta airport, I almost didn’t make it onto the plane. I’d convinced Sandra to go with me, since her husband was stationed there as well. We scrimped and saved for our plane tickets and took the cheapest flight, the red-eye. Sandra balked at the sight of the plane. I didn’t want to climb those steps into the plane’s tiny door any more than she did, but she announced that she was staying home. I said, “Oh, no. You are going with me,” and dragged her onto the plane.

  Things only got worse when we arrived. It occurred to me as we zipped past Fort Belvoir on the Greyhound bus that something was wrong. Charles had told me to catch the bus to the base, but I’d never seen a city bus. In my mind, the word bus meant Trailways or Greyhound. I jumped out of my seat and told the driver we needed to turn around. He said, “Lady, you’re on the wrong bus. We’re not stopping, so you might as well sit down.”

  I stepped down closer to him and heard myself say in my best Edna imitation, “Listen, you have to stop this bus right now.” By then, the base was miles behind us. The passengers became quiet, peering over the tops of the headrests. He stopped the bus.

  Dressed in skirts and heels, with cars and trucks whizzing by us, Sandra and I lugged our suitcases across the six-lane highway. I found a pay phone at a gas station and called a cab. I’d never been so happy to see Charles in all my life. That week we never left the base. I’d spent all my sightseeing money on cab fare, which cost more than my plane ticket.

  The next Monday morning when I showed up at work, my supervisor didn’t say a word. Back on the line, as I singed the two tiny threads together and tapped my foot pedal ever so slightly, I replayed telling him I’d be back in a week, feeling the satisfaction of speaking up, of having choices. After I returned from visiting Charles, my supervisor never picked on me again.

  TWO YEARS later, since I’d been the
last one to be hired, I was the first one to go when GE went into layoff mode. Shortly afterward, I found out I was pregnant. Even though I wanted to look for a new job, Charles and I had always planned on having two kids, so it also felt natural to focus on building our family. I settled in at home, cooking, gardening, and tending to our new daughter, Vickie. It turned out that my mother was right. Home economics came in handy after all.

  She may not have come to my wedding, but every day my mother, dressed in a man’s jumpsuit, appeared on my doorstep. Charles begged me to ask her if she could please stay home a couple of days a week so we could have the house to ourselves. I was grateful for the fact that she slung that soiled pile of cloth diapers through the wringer washer on the porch daily. Nursing Vickie, I’d watch her through the window as she unpinned the frozen diapers off the clothesline, her hands stiff and red with cold.

  I was also grateful for how she doted on her granddaughter. It reminded me of how she took to Uncle Howard’s two boys, Billy and Buddy. When I was young, the boys, still toddlers, lived with us for several months. She rocked and loved those boys like I’d never seen. After their mother moved away with them, my mother grieved. Watching her care for Vickie, I knew she and Vickie would have the close relationship she and I never could.

  Three years after Vickie was born, Phillip came along. His birth was the first time I made headlines, when the Anniston Star read, JACKSONVILLE WOMAN BEATS THE STORK. As we sped to the hospital in the middle of the night, escorted by the policeman who’d stopped us for speeding, we had no idea that the strange screeching sound we heard was Vickie’s poor cat, who’d been asleep on the engine—after that, he didn’t stick around much longer. Seconds after Charles dropped me off at the emergency room—he hadn’t even parked the car—I delivered Phillip.