My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (2 page)

He was always patient with me, even though I had quite a temper. When I was very little, there were times when I’d actually kick him in the shins, or slam my bedroom door so hard the house would shake. He told me years later that he didn’t spank me because he didn’t want to break my spirit. “I figured you’d need that spunk to make it in the world.”

Most Saturday mornings I woke up to the sound of a push mower and the smell of fresh-cut grass. I would lie in bed, somewhere between awake and asleep, not wanting to open my eyes. It was getting close to summer, and by eleven o’clock in the morning, mothers who were worried about the heat would be bringing their children inside to play. But right now, the air was fresh and cool and the day was full of possibilities.

The grass in our yard was St. Augustine. I could put a blade of it between my thumbs and whistle loud enough to get the attention of all the dogs in the neighborhood. We had the best yard in town, with grass that was like a plush green carpet and so thick the blades on Daddy’s mower had to be sharpened every week or two. I could tell when this needed to happen just by the sound of the effort in his pushing. Daddy’s mower was the old-fashioned kind. Our neighbor, Doris Pittman—a nice man with a woman’s name—had a new gas mower that didn’t need pushing. One day it ran over his toes and cut some of them off. After that, Daddy didn’t have to remind my brothers and me never to mow a lawn in bare feet.

Daddy had his rules. He thought that running around barefoot in the cold grass would make us sick with pneumonia. So every spring as the weather turned balmy, my brothers and I waited for him to decide when the ground was warm enough to take off our shoes and socks and go barefoot. It was a yearly ritual. All the other kids in town might be running around like wild animals, but we had to wait.

One morning, we followed Daddy out into the backyard, watched him kneel down, stretch out his arms, and feel the ground. He sank his hands into the fresh-mown grass and pondered for a moment. Then he picked up some old pecans that had fallen from a tree and cracked them in his fist. I held my breath. A ladybug landed on my sleeve, a sign of good luck. Maybe today would be the day. Daddy handed me a piece of pecan. Then he leaned down, felt the ground again, and finally gave us the nod.

The grass was soft and cool, and my feet were tender and white. Soon I would be walking up and down blistering hot oil roads that crisscrossed the town, leaving temporary footprints in the soft tar. Most of the time I ran to keep from getting burned, the tips of my toes barely touching the asphalt. By the end of summer my feet would be as tough as leather and stained black, and it was always a challenge to squeeze into my Sunday shoes. Then, sure as rain, the seasons would change and school would start, and my barefoot days would be over until spring came around again, and Daddy would give us the word.

As far as I know, the first people to settle in Wood County, Texas, were Caddo Indians, who lived in small farming villages along the Sabine River. All that’s left of them are the arrowheads that still turn up in the soil of freshly tilled fields. Daddy used to take us arrowhead hunting when he would drive out to look at land. I can still smell the rich dirt as we walked along the furrows, scouring the surface for glints of flint. It must have honed my skill as a spotter of lost objects, because I’m always finding things on sidewalks and gravel roads.

The white settlers who moved into Wood County in the nineteenth century planted corn and cotton in the rich bottomland, and cut and milled timber from the vast piney forests. Quitman, founded in 1850, was made the county seat, and a fine courthouse was erected in the middle of town. But Wood County’s agricultural heyday ended with the Great Depression, when the timber and cotton markets went bust. Nobody could seem to keep track of how many people lost their farms and moved away. It looked like Quitman was destined to become a speck of dust on an old Texas road map until, in 1940, a couple of wildcatters struck oil about twenty miles southeast of town.

Quitman still had open sewers when my parents arrived in 1945. But before long the streets were getting fixed, fresh paint was everywhere, and the place was filling up with new faces. To me, the most exciting new additions were Ben Merritt, a physician who became our family doctor, and his wife, Susan. The first time I saw them I was eye-level with steps leading up to the Methodist church parsonage when two of the fanciest pairs of shoes walked by. I looked up, and those shoes were attached to a beautiful young couple who had just stepped out of a green and white Mercury sedan, the likes of which I had never seen. I wondered if I would be lucky enough to ever know such exciting and sophisticated people. Within weeks, that green and white Mercury sedan was parked out in front of my house, Susan and Mother had become great friends, and lucky me got to tag along everywhere with them. Susan was from New Orleans, which added to her glamor, and I loved to listen to her talk. She had a little Cajun dog called Nipper, a name that came out of her mouth as “Nippah.”

Quitman didn’t have too much of anything, but it had everything we needed. There was a bank and a grocery store, a hardware store, two pharmacies, a doctor and a dentist, three or four churches, and two cafes: Busby’s and the Westerner Cafe. On Sunday afternoons, it got pretty busy at those cafes, and there was a bit of a rivalry between the different denominations in town over who got the best seats after services ended. Our Methodist church was practically across the street from the Baptist church, and they always seemed to let out about ten minutes ahead of us. We’d still be listening to the end of the sermon when we’d hear the car doors slamming down the block, and everybody would start squirming in the pews, knowing that once again the Baptists were going to get the best tables for lunch. The rivalry hardly affected our family, because Mother would usually have a roast slow-cooking in the oven while we were in church, or else she would fry a chicken as soon as we got home.

When we needed to shop for good clothes, our whole family would drive to Mineola, eleven miles south of Quitman. The place with the best shoes was Hirsch’s store. The Hirsches were small, round people whose voices sounded different than most of the people we knew. Theirs were raspy and high, like they’d smoked a lot of cigarettes or had bad laryngitis, and they talked faster than the slow drawl we were used to hearing. It was a big treat to go to Hirsch’s store for better clothes and shoes. Mr. Hirsch was a very good shoe fitter. He would press his thumb near the end of our toes and have us wiggle them up and down. Then we would walk around the store so he could make sure our heels didn’t slide up and down and rub blisters.

One year, Mr. Hirsch bought a special new shoe fitting machine. The marvelous wooden box sat in the front of the store, right next to a large green scale that measured weight and told fortunes. We picked out our new shoes, and I stood behind my brothers as we lined up for our turns at the machine. “Girls first,” I heard Mr. Hirsch say in his funny voice. With two older brothers, I was not used to going first. I hesitated. Mr. Hirsch took my hand and pulled me in front of the boys. I climbed up on the big wooden box and slid my feet into the machine while I peered through one of the eye portals on the top. Mr. Hirsch flipped a switch and all of a sudden the bones in my feet lit up inside of my shoes. We could see that this new pair fit me perfectly. When I stepped down, my brothers shoved and pushed each other to try to get on next. Mr. Hirsch was a nice man; he let us use that X-ray shoe fitting machine over and over again, as much as we wanted.

If you didn’t want to drive to Mineola for clothes, or have them homemade, the only remaining option was McDade’s dry goods on the downtown square. It didn’t have much variety or any of the newest styles, but we loved it anyway. McDade’s always smelled like sharpened pencils and rubber-soled shoes, and all the merchandise was piled up on open tables where even kids could reach it. They sold overalls and work boots, things like that, and maybe a dress or two. The dresses on the manikins in the front window had been there so long that they were faded on the side that the sun hit, while the back looked brand-new.

McDade’s was where we bought our blue jeans. I was so small I stood on a cardboard box to try them on. My brothers got jeans with zippers; I got elastic waists. This was when I first realized that life was not always fair.

My brothers and I were very close growing up spite the fact that I was a girl. All I wanted was to be like Ed and Robbie; I idolized them. After he outgrew it, I inherited Ed’s gray felt cowboy hat and wore it sideways. It ended up so shapeless you couldn’t tell what it was, but I loved it anyway because it was his.

Once, when I was four, we were playing football in the front yard. It was summertime, and we were all hot and sweaty, so we took our T-shirts off. My mother came outside and told me to put my shirt back on.

“Why?” I said.

“Because you’re a girl.”

That double standard did not sit well with me. I did not like wearing frilly dresses. I wasn’t even that interested in dolls; I cut the hair off of the one fancy Madame Alexander doll my mother gave me. We used another one for target practice. I just wanted to do what my brothers were doing.

Then one of my uncles told me if I could kiss my elbow, I’d turn into a boy.

I spent a lot of my childhood trying to kiss my elbow.

For years, until Daddy built an addition to the house, I shared a bedroom with my brothers. I had a lot of friends, but Ed and Robbie wouldn’t allow girls to come over to play very often, especially if they were “sissy” girls. You had to be tough to keep up with my brothers. Of course, sometimes it backfired on me. When I was in grade school, a boy in my class dropped a rock on my head from the top of the tallest slide. I was still seeing stars when the teachers came running and I heard one of them ask the boy, “Now, why in the world would you drop a rock on Sissy’s head?”

“’Cause I like her,” he said.

My brothers and I were inseparable. I tagged along with Robbie, and he tagged along with Ed. When Mother asked us what we wanted for lunch, I’d say, “I don’t know. What’s Ed having?” “I don’t know. What’s Robbie having?” And Robbie would say, “I don’t know. What’s Ed having?” Pretty soon she realized she only needed to ask Ed. Robbie and I weren’t always that much fun for our big brother, but he was a patient, sensitive boy and he took good care of us, in spite of the embarrassment of having his little brother and sister around all the time.

Robbie was a beautiful, sunny child with olive skin, light hair, and a wide-open smile. When he was born, my mother said he looked up into her eyes so deeply that it frightened her. There was always something special about him, but his good nature didn’t keep us from fighting. We’d have some real knock-down, drag-outs. Once my mother caught him hitting me in the stomach. “Robbie, you can’t hit Sissy there!” she said. She pointed to my leg, arm, and backside. “If you want to hit her, hit her here.”

Parents in those days didn’t think their children were too fragile for a few lumps. One morning my mother looked out the window and saw our neighbor Bev Benton’s two-year-old, wearing nothing but diapers and crawling on the roof of their two-story house. Some workers had left a ladder leaning against the siding, and Matt went exploring. Mother was terrified and called her friend right away.

“Bev, Matt’s up on the roof!”

“Oh, thanks, Gin,” said Bev.

Then Mother watched from across the street as Bev calmly put down the phone, leaned her head out the window, and shouted, “Matt, you come down off that roof right now! You’re gonna make it leak!”

I’m sure that story spread all over town before the two women had hung up. In the 1950s, Quitman still had party lines and a central telephone operator named Ganelle Rushing. She was a friendly, portly young woman who worked out of a concrete building next to the dentist’s office. She was command central and knew everything that was going on in town. When I was little, I’d pick up the phone and hear her say, “Number please?”

“Ganelle, do you know where my mama is?”