If These Walls Had Ears (22 page)

Rita says the kitchen was
the
big change they made in the appearance of this house. Here in this old place, they indulged in very little of what you might
call pure decorating—changes made to please the soul instead of to redress the injustices of age. For a while, Rita’s brother
lived in the downstairs back bedroom, and he wanted his room red. They bought him the paint and let him do it. Their most
ambitious attempt at pure cosmetics was in the living and dining area—the bowling alley. Just before they moved out, they
tried a two-tone green motif, lighter on the walls and a tad darker on the squares of decorative molding. Rita felt, after
it was all done, that she hadn’t quite pulled it off, that the two colors hadn’t contrasted enough.

When the days and evenings of work were over, they would retreat to the den and watch television—which increasingly featured
news of the Vietnam War or the trial of the Chicago Seven or the search for the Weathermen. Those were unsettling times, and
the anxiety of the era was reflected in the house itself. Sitting there in the den at 501 Holly, Roy and Rita could usually
hear footsteps skittering in the walls, as if the decay all around them had thousands of legs and could outrun any human effort
to overtake it. One night, the footsteps weren’t
in
the walls. Roy cornered a huge rat in the music room. He yelled for Rita to bring him a towel, arid when the rat tried to
get past him, Roy pounced on it with the heavy cloth. He took it outside and beat it until it stopped squealing.

There’s such a thing as being out of sync with your surroundings. I haven’t said this to Rita and Roy, but I believe that’s
what happened to them. In one respect, they were ahead of their time; in another, they were too late.

When they moved to Hillcrest, the area at large had become old—both the houses and the people who lived in them. The commercial
buildings on Kavanaugh were clearly deteriorating. A neighborhood study showed that the population of Pulaski Heights had
dropped .10 percent between 1960 and 1970. In the early 1960s, the Methodist church—the church the Grimeses attended—even
considered leaving its location on Woodlawn Street and moving farther west, following the trend. Like the Murphrees, that’s
where most of the people had gone. Others had simply died. Over the next decade, the restless generation would discover this
old neighborhood and move into it, feverishly fixing up the inexpensive houses and trying to connect with a life that had
charm and meaning. In those terms, Roy and Rita were practically alone when they came here. They were gentrification pioneers.

Many of their neighbors were elderly. One old lady was on the telephone the
minute
the Grimes family dog, a Pekinese named Pixie, started barking. Others seemed to resent any evidence of fun, especially if
it involved music that wasn’t by Lawrence Welk. One summer night, Roy and Rita and a few friends had cooked out and then migrated
to the front porch. It was only around nine o’clock, and they were swinging and rocking and enjoying themselves when one of
the men started everybody singing—Roy doesn’t remember the song, only that it was loud. Soon Mr. Grimes was wanted on the
phone.

“Are you having a party over there?” said a voice. It was someone from a few houses away.

“Well,” said Roy, “kind of.”

“Well, this is a decent neighborhood,” said the caller, “and we’d appreciate it if you’d get quiet.”

Another night, the entire family was spread out on the floor in the bowling alley, playing Monopoly. The children were fidgeting
and crawling and trying to pay attention, and Roy and Rita were shaking the dice, dealing the cards, and handling the money.
Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Roy opened it and two policemen stood there. “We have a report that you’re gambling
in this house,” the cop said. Even now, Roy and Rita are incredulous about that episode. They suspect that someone who was
canvassing the neighborhood for a charity had come to the door and caught a glimpse of them through the window and then had
dashed off to report the further decline of morals in Hillcrest.

In August 1969, Rita went to the hospital to have another baby. It was a girl, Kristi—the second child born to this house.
While Rita was gone, Roy stayed home with the children. Scott was seven, Mark six, Lori three and a half. The three males
used that time to build a patio in the backyard. Roy spread a bed of sand and ordered a load of bricks to lay in it. He worked
for hours on his knees in the hot sun, the boys bringing him brick after brick. He laid them in with out mortar, two this
way and two that, effecting the classic basket weave. When he finished the patio, he poured concrete and installed a gas grill,
the latest thing. Scott and Mark etched their initials in the concrete. Everything looked beautiful, except that anyone sitting
on the patio would list north to south at about ten degrees. I asked Roy, the civil engineer, why he did it that way. “That’s
the way the land was,” he said. He didn’t recall their using the patio very much.

The four Grimes children, posed in front of Rita's new stove and range
.

Scott and Mark were both at Pulaski Heights Elementary that fall, Scott in the second grade, Mark in the first. Rita found
herself feeling lonely with the boys off at school. Scott, she says, kept the house pretty lively when he was at home, and
I can see what she means even in his photographs. There’s a sunny kind of cockiness that comes through in the way he angles
his head and breaks into his lazy smile. Rita says Scott took great delight in pestering his little brother and Lori, keeping
them upset, making them run and tell. Mark was mischievous but sweet, always flashing an engaging, snaggle-toothed grin from
having knocked out a tooth in a fall when he was three. The strange thing about Mark was that he was scared to death of rain.
Sometimes the family would go sit on the porch in a spring storm, but Mark wouldn’t set foot outside the door. Lori, on the
other hand, looks like someone the rain wouldn’t touch even if she was standing in it. There’s a wonderful photo of her—of
all the kids—again taken in front of the new stove. Lori, probably age five or six, is wearing nothing but white underpants,
and she looks like a golden-haired California girl, one of those suntanned angels glowing with good health and blessed with
promise.

In fact, looking at photographs like that one, I have a hard time remembering that not everything was perfect in the Grimes
household.

Even though Lori was good company, Rita felt like a bit of a misfit on Holly Street. She yearned to have a conversation during
the day with somebody over the age of three. In her old neighborhood, several of the mothers gathered daily with their children
and helped one another pass the time. There might’ve been as many as fifteen kids in tow, all under the age of six. It had
been madness, but fun. Here on Holly, Rita was by far the youngest woman on the block. Most of the other wives worked, and
the ones who stayed home were old. It was just another way the Grimeses were out of sync.

In 1971, Rita and Roy learned that the Little Rock school district was going to start court-ordered busing. This was one of
those wrangles that seemed to have been going on forever—since Central High, at least, which had been fifteen years before.
Throughout the sixties, the Little Rock school board had been studying ways of achieving “desegregation,” and even in 1966
there had been articles in the newspaper that pointed clearly to busing. Rita says she hadn’t noticed them, or hadn’t paid
attention. Now, suddenly, having nine grades just three blocks from Holly Street was totally moot.

To add the proverbial insult to injury, Scott and Mark didn’t qualify to be actually
bused
to school. The rule was, if you lived two miles away from your new school
as the crow flies,
a bus would pick you up and bring you home. By that measurement, Forest Park Elementary was just under two miles from 501
Holly.

Rita’s days of boredom were over, replaced with a regimen that kept her on the go. She packed five-year-old Lori and two-year-old
Kristi up in the morning so she could take the boys to school. To complicate matters, Lori was starting kindergarten that
year. In the afternoons, Rita and Kristi had to drive one place to pick Lori up at noon, then come
back
for Mark and Scott at 3:30. The next year Mark was transferred to a school farther away, so he was bused. That didn’t help,
since Rita still had to be away from the house morning and afternoon hauling Scott and Lori. Rita remembers one period when
she had to make three afternoon pickups—at noon, 2:00, and 3:30.

The truth is, moving to 501 Holly had taken some of the fun out of life for Rita and Roy. Since they’d been here, they hadn’t
been able to go and do the way they had in the past. Of course, now they had four children —that had something to do with
it. But the house itself was expensive to keep up. Before, they had partied at restaurants and clubs, Now, at Holly Street,
they tended to invite friends to play cards at home. Occasionally, on fall Saturdays, a group would meet here and they would
all walk the nine blocks to War Memorial Stadium for an Arkansas Razorbacks football game. They threw only one major party
in this house in seven years, on New Year’s Eve 1970. Rita’s mother kept the kids, and Roy cleared the furniture out of the
bowling alley and everybody danced to the eight-track—to
hell
with the neighbors. Cabin fever had definitely set in. Rita says there’s an 8-mm movie of that party, but she refuses to
let me see it.

I think it’s telling that one of the fondest memories Rita and Roy seem to have of their time in this house didn’t happen
here. One spring in the early 1970s, they went to New Orleans with their Russellville friends Jim and Lynn Hardin to celebrate
both couples’ wedding anniversaries. Lynn had introduced Roy to Rita, and Jim and Roy had been friends for ages. On this night
in New Orleans, they all had a wonderful time eating and drinking and catching up with what was important in one another’s
lives. Soon these couples would decide to build a lake house together, an A-frame nestled among the oaks and hickories on
Greer’s Ferry Lake, two hours north of Little Rock. From the wistful way both Roy and Rita tell me this story, I sense that
this joint lake house was an expression of how much they had missed one another, how much they had been missing the good times.

The celebration, the toasts, went on for hours. Before the night was over, these old friends were walking arm in arm together
through the ancient streets of the French Quarter, and the song they were singing was “American Pie,” an anthem about changing
times.

Roy’s escape came with a phone call out of the blue. Rita’s aunt owned quite a few pieces of property, and she regularly worked
with a certain Realtor. One day, this Realtor called Roy and asked if he could come look at their house. Being nice to the
man because of Rita’s aunt, Roy agreed. The Realtor was interested in seeing everything, so Roy and Rita escorted him around.

A couple of days later, the man called Roy again. He said he could sell this house if Roy was interested. The truth is, Roy
and Rita never had openly discussed selling. Rita loved the house despite the problems with the neighborhood, and Roy had
repaired the major defects. They’d even bought an antique dining room suite, so the bowling alley was no longer quite so empty.
Roy told the man he wasn’t interested in selling. The Realtor said to let him know if he changed his mind.

Then, before he hung up, Roy said, “What do you think you could sell it for?” The Realtor threw out a number.

Weekends at the lake house, the kids water skiing, Roy and Jim reeling in the bass. At the end of the day, there was the party
barge—was anything more peaceful than drifting on the glassy lake at sunset, sipping a cocktail, watching the day go orange
and slip beyond the water?

All in all, Roy decided, he’d rather spend his weekends like that, instead of painting and wallpapering and watching for the
latest crack in the plaster. He let the Realtor know their decision.

And then Sheri Mabry walked back into Rita’s life.