Spoken from the Heart (16 page)

While I was figuring out how to be a teacher, I was also learning how to be a grown-up in Houston. I knew Houston from summer trips with Mother and Daddy. One of my college boyfriends had been from Houston, and even Regan's mom, Wanda, had moved there.

In our little apartment, Janet and I would host dinner parties and fix King Ranch chicken, a famous casserole of tortillas, cheese, chicken, and three different cans of soup. Janet's mother had sent her off with the Abilene Junior League cookbook, and we thought it was a good cookbook, since most recipes called for several cans of creamed soup. We hosted our dinner parties, inviting our boyfriends and their friends, with everyone crammed onto our few pieces of furniture, eating from plates perched on their laps. We went to the Athens Bar & Grill, an old Greek place along the ship channel. At the other scarred tables were sailors from the far corners of the world; their ships had docked in Houston. We drove to Austin for football games and headed west to Laredo, on the banks of the Rio Grande, one of the oldest border crossing points between the United States and Mexico. We went to bars to drink and restaurants for dinner, because there is only so much King Ranch chicken that anyone can eat. A couple of our friends had sailboats, and we would spend afternoons blowing about on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, traversing the foul-smelling, oil-covered Houston ship channel to sail. Another close friend of mine from SMU had an old family beach house that we visited out on the barrier island of Galveston. It was built of weathered wood and sat up on stilts to give it a slim chance against the fierce hurricanes and blanketing tides that would periodically rip through.

In Houston, after my brief flirtation with working in a brokerage house, I dated a stockbroker while, one by one, my friends settled down. Regan, who had bounced from house to house and even from state to state during her growing up, was one of the first to say "I do," with Billy Gammon, who worked in his family's insurance business. Then Peggy married Ronnie Weiss, and Janet married Fred Heyne. Right after their wedding, Regan and Billy moved east, to New York, so he could train at a top insurance firm. In the fall of 1970, my stockbroker boyfriend invited me to New York, where he had meetings, and we went out to dinner with Regan and Billy. The next day, my boyfriend took Regan and me, in our fashionable miniskirted dresses, down to Wall Street. We walked onto one of the brokerage trading floors with him to get a glimpse of high finance. I saw a sea of desks and agitated men grabbing at ringing phones, until some guy yelled out, "Hey, who are the bimbos?"

We thought it was hilarious. Regan was a newlywed and newly pregnant. As for me, how many bimbos are able to moonlight as second-grade teachers and school librarians?

In Houston, I lived in the place for singles, the Chateaux Dijon, a sprawling, block-long apartment complex with several swimming pools and turrets rising on each side. With its sloping gray roof, it had pretensions of being a brown-brick Versailles. My suite was a revolving door of four roommates, including Jan Donnelly, one of my Midland friends, who moved home in 1972 to marry Joey O'Neill. One summer, I spent nearly every day at the pool reading the classics of Russian literature, traveling through the frigid, snow-laden novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the swampy heat of Houston, where by midmorning you could break a sweat simply by stepping outside.

Reading and books were my passion, and I began to think seriously of enrolling in graduate school for library science. Also, as much as I loved Houston, I wanted a change. Like my parents moving from house to house, I had uncovered a similar restlessness, from teaching to setting off for the East Coast, moving to Houston, working in a brokerage house, going back to the classroom. I had so many options that I was seeking an anchor to ground myself. Here my married friends had it almost easier; they had already made their choices, and a quadrant of their lives was settled. I was determined to settle on a job, and I wanted to be surrounded by books.

I applied to the library science program at University of Texas and was accepted. But before I left for Austin, I wanted to take two of my favorite students from Kennedy to AstroWorld, an amusement park near the baseball stadium. My boyfriend, Ralph, and I arrived on a Saturday morning to pick them up. One of the boys was waiting, all dressed, with his sister; their mother obviously hoped that we couldn't resist an outing for the two of them. And we couldn't. We put both in the car and headed over to the other boy's house. He opened the door in his underwear and couldn't manage to get dressed while we were there. He was nine and going into fourth grade. We could hear his mother in the back of the house, but she never came to the door. I hugged him good-bye with an extra squeeze. There were many kids like him. The disarray of their parents' lives repeatedly spilled over into their own.

Three decades later, in 2003, a couple of days before Christmas, the John F. Kennedy Elementary School found me again. I was sitting in a television studio in Washington, D.C., with the then host of NBC's
Meet the Press,
Tim Russert. We were taping his Christmas show, and the other guest for the morning was Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the president. The red lights on the cameras were lit, and their giant eyes were swiveling just out of sight in the set when Tim announced, "In 1969 and the early 1970s, you taught at the John F. Kennedy School."

And I turned to Caroline Kennedy to say that I had once taught at a school named for her father.

My first apartment in Austin was a hand-me-down from my friend Bobbie Jo, who had come back to Texas after her year of self-imposed exile. She had left the world of department store retail to return to school to earn a graduate degree in education. Like me, she had spent that first year out of college teaching in Dallas.

The apartment was on the second floor of an old wood-frame house. I had to walk up a metal fire escape that groaned and clanged to reach it. Once when I stepped into a tiny storage space under the eves, my leg sank through the cheap Sheetrock into the apartment below. Bobbie Jo left behind a kitten from her cat's litter. I named her Dewey, for the Dewey decimal system, a library staple. My home was now two rooms, a living room in front, a bedroom in the back, and a slim pass-through kitchen in between. I painted the cabinets cobalt blue. My painting jobs were never as good upon completion as they were in my imagination. My furnishings were secondhand pieces from junk shops.

The library school was located in the Harry Ransom Center on the UT campus, a treasure trove of rare manuscripts from Shakespeare's First Folio to manuscripts by the Bronte sisters and John Keats and the page proofs from James Joyce's
Ulysses
. I was learning about the conservation of books in a place with some of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the world.

In January of 1973, the day after Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term, Lyndon Johnson died in his bed at his ranch. His flag-draped coffin was brought to lie in state at the Johnson Presidential Library on the UT campus. I was one of thousands who lined up to file past the casket of "our Texas president." One of my library professors had wept that day in class, saying, "President Johnson made it possible for me to get the money to go on to graduate school." Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters, Lynda and Luci, stood at the entrance, shaking hands with everyone who walked through that afternoon. I extended mine, never imagining that someday we would meet again.

After I got my degree, I returned to Houston. My plan was to work in a public library, which would have a far more extensive collection than a school. I envisioned working in the main, downtown branch, where I could help readers and researchers and where I might meet an eligible man on my lunch hour. I was offered a post in the Kashmere Gardens Neighborhood Library, in an African-American section of Houston, sandwiched between a rail line and an industrial building corridor. Instead of businessmen looking for mystery novels, I helped families find books, and as soon as school ended, we were overrun with children who had no place else safe to go; I was their de facto caregiver. I read stories and devised activities, and I began to visit the neighborhood elementary schools to lend them library books for their classrooms. When the library was quiet, I read. Inspired by my mother and Lady Bird Johnson's love of wildflowers, I devoured books about landscaping. I read every book in the library with advice about how to quit smoking, and I read stacks of literary classics. One of my library colleagues invited me to join her women's consciousness-raising group, and I did. We talked about sisterhood and read still more books, including
Sisterhood Is Powerful
and works by Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.

But I missed Austin. I missed being able to gaze up at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, where at dusk the sun cast a violet crown around the rising land. I enjoyed Austin's small space, its lake and trails. And I missed working in a school. In the summer, I quit my job in Houston and returned to Austin, to a tiny apartment in another old, converted house near the downtown, and began applying for jobs. Regan and Billy had also moved to Austin from New York, and Regan and I slipped back into the easy flow of friendship that had been the compass of our teenage lives. Indeed, I was in Regan's house, borrowing her iron to press my skirts and watching television on the afternoon when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

Countless other afternoons, I would head to Regan and Billy's around five o'clock and watch as Regan cooked dinner; I really learned to cook in her kitchen. Billy often invited friends over, and we would eat and then I would head home. Other nights we wandered to Armadillo World Headquarters to hear country music or rock 'n' roll. Austin in those years billed itself as the anti-Nashville, showcasing music without the corporate side, and the Armadillo was the central symbol of its musical underground. Once, I took my parents to eat in the Armadillo's beer garden, where Daddy ran into Johnny Hackney's daughter, Mandy. The shocked look on her face told me that I was one of the few people to ever take their parents anywhere near the Armadillo World Headquarters.

I had a new job working in a library, this time as the school librarian for the Molly Dawson Elementary School, in a largely Hispanic neighborhood. Now my day was spent with children and books, and each class was my much-loved story hour. For many small children, there is a fine line between reality and fantasy, and it's easy for them to cross back and forth, just as little boys trot off to face imaginary bad guys in their Superman capes. Books and their stories help children do just that. I wanted these children, like the ones at John F. Kennedy, to dream of possibilities beyond their web of city blocks and brick school walls.

Unlike other urban schools during that era, Dawson was lucky enough to have music, art, and physical education teachers, along with a librarian, and we were the only educators who had a chance to work with every student in the school. But we went a step beyond that. Dawson's music teacher came up with the idea of applying for a special grant to develop and teach an entire interdisciplinary curriculum based on the nation's bicentennial. We taught our students about American history not simply with textbooks and time lines but through the music, art, and literature of the Revolutionary period. During gym, the students played Revolutionary-era games and learned colonial dances. We used grant money to take the children on field trips to the historic sites of Laredo and San Antonio. Many of our kids had barely been out of the confines of greater Austin.

My life had found its routine: work in Austin, visits to Midland a few times a year. Although while at Kennedy I had spent the summer of 1971 taking a University of California course in England, living in Oxford, where I studied the schools in Bath and Exeter and took quick jaunts out to the English countryside, now my summer vacations consisted of a week or two of visiting Mother and Daddy and trips around Texas to visit friends. I was back on the flat asphalt highway between Austin and Midland, bisecting the geography of Texas, the Big Empty, as it is often known. And I was thirty years old.