Spoken from the Heart (17 page)

For at least a year, my friend Jan Donnelly's husband, Joey O'Neill, had been telling me that he wanted to introduce me to one of his friends. Jan had gone to Lee High School and had lived with me in Houston at the Chateaux Dijon. After spending a few years in San Francisco, Jan and Joey had come home to live in Midland. Joey was working in his dad's oil business, and his childhood friend George Bush was working as an oil landman, scouring county courthouse records for land that might be leased for drilling wells. Joey talked up George every time I stopped by to visit with Jan.

I was in no rush. I had a vague memory of George from the seventh grade, almost twenty years before. I knew that his dad had run for Senate and lost in 1970, when I first moved to Houston, and I assumed that George would be very interested in politics, while I was not.

It was late July, one of those high heat days when, come dusk, the sun had, as Willa Cather wrote, "left behind it a spent and exhausted world." I put on a blue sundress, drove the car around the corner, and walked up to the door of Jan and Joey's brown-brick town house. Even the roof was a cedar-shake brown. The cicadas were droning, and overlaying their vibrating wings was the steady whir of air conditioners to keep the baking-hot houses cool. Joey was at the grill. It was not some elaborate party; it was just the four of us--Jan, Joey, George, and me--sitting out back, eating hamburgers. We laughed and talked until it was nearly midnight. The next day, the phone rang. It was George saying, "Let's go play miniature golf." And so we did, with Jan and Joey tagging along as our chaperones.

The miniature golf course is one of the prettiest places in Midland. It was built among a veritable forest of old elm trees, which had grown tall and graceful even in the West Texas ground. We played golf under the stars and laughed again. Then I went back to Austin, and George started visiting on the weekends. Sometimes he would fly over on a Friday night, or he would drive, but he came every weekend, except for the very end of August, when he left for Maine to see his family. Bar Bush loves to tell the story that George spent exactly one day in Kennebunkport that summer. When he called my apartment, she says that "some guy answered, and he raced for a plane and flew right back down."

I returned to the library at Dawson and worked all through September. By the end of the month, George had asked me to marry him. We had been dating only six or seven weeks but our childhoods overlapped so completely and our worlds were so intertwined, it was as if we had known each other our whole lives. I loved how he made me laugh and his steadfastness. I knew in my heart that he was the one. I looked at him and said yes. That Sunday night, when George arrived in Midland, he headed to Humble Avenue to speak to my parents. A week later, early on a Sunday morning, George and I drove to Houston for his niece Noelle's christening. Jeb and Columba Bush had a little house in Larchmont, a neighborhood just past the Chateaux Dijon. The senior Bushes and their good friends Susan and Jim Baker were already there. I said hello to the Bakers first, and then George took my hand and led me to meet his parents. He introduced me with the news that we were getting married.

After lunch at the Bushes' home, George's dad pulled out his pocket calendar and looked over each weekend that fall. In a few minutes, we had picked a wedding date: November 5, 1977, one day after my birthday, one day before the anniversary of the awful accident, and only about three weeks away. There was no time even to order printed wedding invitations. Mother wrote and addressed all of ours by hand.

I gave my two weeks' notice at Dawson and went wedding dress shopping with Regan in Austin. I had been in a number of large Texas weddings, where the brides wore long, white gowns and elaborate, lacy veils and had acres of bridesmaids. George and I wanted a very simple celebration. I bought my dress, an ivory silk skirt and blouse, at a store called Maharani's, where most of the clothing came from India or Afghanistan. I would carry a bouquet of gardenias and pin gardenias in my hair. We had no groomsmen or bridesmaids and invited only our immediate family and close friends, about seventy-five people, a very small wedding by Texas standards.

Far more nervous than either the bride or the groom were Jan and Joey O'Neill. Joey and Jan had dated for years before they got married. Neither had dreamed that their invitation to dinner would lead us to the altar in a mere three months. And perhaps it wouldn't have if Joey had introduced us when we were growing up in Midland, or when George and I had lived on opposite sides of the sprawling Chateaux Dijon in Houston, or at almost any other moment prior to that night. But at that particular moment, on that warm summer night, both of us were hoping to find someone. We were not looking for someone to date but for someone with whom to share life, for the rest of our lives. We both wanted children. We were ready to build an enduring future.

Those were the facts of our lives when we went to dinner that night. It was the right timing for both of us.

Of course, not everyone in Midland agreed.

As I was packing to leave Austin, Regan and Billy were selling their house. A week before the wedding, the mother of a friend of mine from Midland came to see Regan and Billy's house. She was thinking of buying it for her daughter. She didn't recognize Regan, but Regan recognized her and said, "We're going to be in Midland next weekend. We're going to Laura and George's wedding." And without a second's hesitation, this woman said to Regan, "Yes, can you imagine? The most eligible bachelor in Midland marrying the old maid of Midland?"

Regan was speechless. But I thought it was funny. After all, I am four months less two days younger than George.

The movers loaded up my few things. After the last box was stowed, my cat, Dewey, and I began the drive that I had never quite imagined making, back to live in Midland. Right outside of San Angelo, I came upon a few scattered trees lining the edge of the road. Now, on the verge of November, the frost had already settled on the land, and their leaves had fallen and blown away. Trunks and branches stood dark and empty against the sky. Suddenly, from one naked tree, a great mass of winged birds lifted up, feathers pulsing, air swirling as they rose. I slowed and watched in silence as they beat their migratory way south, then glanced back at the unremarkable tree that had extended its branches for rest and refuge. The sight was like a beautiful wedding gift on the long road toward home.

We were married on a Saturday morning at the First Methodist Church in Midland, the church I had gone to all my childhood, where I was baptized as a baby, where I had learned to sing in the choir, and where my mother still went every Sunday. Methodist weddings are brief, and ours was particularly so. There were no bridesmaids to add a few extra minutes as they walked down the aisle. It was perfect for the "old maid" and the "eligible bachelor." The rehearsal dinner had been held the night before in the windowless basement ballroom of the new Hilton Hotel. Bar and George Bush had hosted it, and the menu was chicken and rice. When dinner was served, my mother blanched. Our wedding reception was to be a post-ceremony luncheon at the Midland Racquet Club the next day, and Mother and the caterer had settled on chicken and rice. Mother and Bar had never thought to compare menus. The next morning, Mother called the caterer at the crack of dawn to see if something could be changed, pasta instead of rice, anything. But the meal was already in motion, so our guests ate chicken and rice all over again.

The morning after my thirty-first birthday, I stepped into the chapel on my father's arm. George was waiting at the altar. The night before, when George stood to give his toast, he'd wept. George and his father are deeply sentimental men. In years to come, to others, the cool remove of television would frequently obscure the depth of their caring, how much and how deeply their own hearts open. George Herbert Walker Bush didn't even try to give a toast. Only Bar spoke.

That morning the stained-glass windows sparkled with light, casting pretty patterns over the simple wooden chapel pews. It was, I later learned, exactly thirty-one steps down the aisle and into the rest of my life.

We chose the beaches of Cozumel, Mexico, for our honeymoon. We drove from our wedding luncheon to Mother and Daddy's house to pick up my bags. On the driveway, we posed for our last round of wedding photos. Mother was our photographer, and she was so nervous and nearsighted that she would hold up the camera, think she had taken a picture, and then hold it down toward the driveway to advance the film. When they were developed, all of our honeymoon departure photos were shots of the driveway and the tips of Mother's dainty feet.

We arrived at the Midland airport for our flight to Houston, only to find the entire Bush family--parents, brothers, and sister--plus all our guests from Houston waiting for the same afternoon plane. It looked as if the Bush entourage was following us all the way to Mexico for our honeymoon. But they disembarked when the plane landed in Houston. We went on to Mexico City and then the next morning to Cozumel, once a thriving Mayan enclave that for centuries was nearly deserted. Pirates sailed its waters, and Abraham Lincoln apparently toyed with the idea of purchasing it to serve as a home for freed slaves. In 1977, it was a quiet island resort. We rented a car and drove around the island, marveling at the ever-present iguanas, who clung to everything, including the bottoms of billboards. In the afternoons, we sat on the beach and drank margaritas. By about the third day, we were drinking Pepto-Bismol. The mid-November weather had turned, so we spent most of the rest of the time in bed--playing gin rummy. Thus did my marriage begin, with a deck of cards, playing a game that led my father to keep a couple of hundred dollars cash in his pocket in case he spotted one of his Midland friends ready to deal him in for a hand.

We returned home to George's new, single-story town house on Golf Course Road, a street named for Midland's first and now long-vanished golf course. George had furnished the house by trading oil leases with Charlie Knorr of Knorr's furniture. One lease had gotten him a brown leather couch. Otherwise, he hadn't done much; in his yard, a small forest of weeds had grown up as tall as the roofline. Indeed, George had hardly done his laundry at home. He used to go to Don and Susie Evans's home for dinner; Susie was Susie Marinis, my kindergarten friend and George's second-grade friend. As he ate, he would do his laundry in the big commercial machines on the first floor of their garden apartment complex.

But we were not destined to hang around home. A few months before George and I met, Representative Mahon had announced his retirement from Congress after forty-four years in office. The seat was open, and George was trying to win it as a Republican. Politics was in his blood. His grandfather had been a U.S. senator, and his father had lost twice running statewide for the U.S. Senate in Texas. But from 1967 to 1971, George H. W. Bush had served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Almost from the moment we arrived home, George and I hit the campaign trail, covering a big swath of West Texas.

We drove up and down the back roads and asphalt highways of the Texas panhandle, from Midland at the southern tip up to Plainview and Hereford in the north, with the New Mexican border running alongside. We spent nearly a year on the road, and in many ways the bonds of our marriage were cemented in the front seat of that Oldsmobile Cutlass. When George and I met, it was as if two parallel lives suddenly converged. Our childhood memories, the places we had known, even many of our friends overlapped. We were like the last two pieces of a puzzle, our similarities and contradictions sized to fit. George was boisterous and loved to talk, while I've always been quieter. And George came from a big family. It was an unexpected answer to my childish wishes on all those stars. On my side, George got to be the only son-in-law. But these layers of connections and commonalities forged a deeper, richer bond. We never worried that any long-buried fact about the other person would appear and surprise us. From the start, our marriage was built on a powerful foundation of trust. We had been cut, as it were, from the same solid Permian Basin stone. So we drove and we talked and we laughed and we dreamed in the front seat of George's Oldsmobile.