Suburban Renewal

Corrie 2002

Sam 1977

Corrie 1977

Sam 1978

Corrie 1979

Sam 1980

Corrie 1982

Sam 1982

Corrie 1984

Sam 1985

Corrie 1986

Sam 1986

Corrie 1987

Sam 1988

Corrie 1989

Sam 1991

Corrie 1992

Sam 1993

Corrie 1993

Sam 1993

Corrie 1994

Sam 1994

Corrie 1995

Sam 1995

Corrie 1996

Sam 1997

Corrie 1997

Sam 1998

Corrie 1998

Sam 1998

Corrie 1999

Sam 1999

Corrie 2000

Sam 2001

Corrie 2002

Nate 2002

2002

“T
he way I see it,” I announced to my husband. “We either renew our vows and start this marriage all over again or we just call it quits and get a divorce.”

Sam's jaw dropped open and he looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

Maybe I had.

It might have been boredom or empty nesting or some weird premenopausal psychosis, but I got up that morning feeling like something had to change and that something
had
changed. It was as if my life, my marriage, was on some monumental precipice. All that was required was for me to give it a little push.

So I pushed.

“You want to renew our wedding vows?” The tone of Sam's question was conciliatory, almost condescending. “Then we'll renew our wedding vows. You don't have to get dramatic or threaten me about it. Number twenty-five is a big anniversary. A nice party with a little ceremony would be fine.”

“I'm not looking for a reason to throw a party,” I told him. “It's time to make it clear that we're together because we want to be.”

He shrugged off that comment. “I'm here. I'm mar
ried to you,” he said.
“Because I want to be goes without saying.”

My translation of those words from
Sam language
to plain English was “Hey, babe, I love you as much today as ever.” But I was no longer certain that making up my own interpretations of his feelings was going to be enough.

We sat across from each other on the deck outside the family room. Sam had been here first, already showered and dressed before I'd even awakened. That was not unusual. Sam had always been a notorious early riser. Fit and tan, at age forty-five, he still had most of his abundant hair, though it was graying, especially at the temples. Dressed in khaki Dockers and a golf shirt, with the swimming pool in the background, Sam looked like a magazine ad for the successful middle-class businessman at his leisure.

He was that, of course, but he couldn't be summed up that easily.

Still in my nightgown, makeup free and bed-headed, I carried my coffee out to join him.

He leaned over to give me a good-morning kiss and handed over the Lifestyle section of the newspaper without me even asking for it. That was because he thought he knew me. He thought he knew what I wanted.

I thought I knew him, too. But I no longer knew what I wanted from him. Or if he still wanted anything from me.

“Still being here is not enough,” I told him. “I refuse to have a marriage based on inertia. If we can't find a reason to stay together, then I'd just as soon start over by myself.”

From the stunned look on his face, I could tell that
Sam was finally taking the discussion seriously. He weighed his response, carefully working out the appropriate words. He was like that. At home or on the job, he rarely allowed himself the luxury of being impulsive. When he spoke his tone carried just exactly the right amount of concern, question and curiosity.

“I didn't realize that you were unhappy,” he said.

I frowned.

“I'm not unhappy,” I told him defensively. “How could I be? I have a satisfying career, two healthy, well-adjusted kids and a wonderful home. I'm emotionally stable and financially secure. Any woman who has all that can't possibly get away with saying she's unhappy.”

Sam let that sink in for a moment.

“So you're not unhappy.”

“No, I'm not unhappy.”

“Usually when the
D
word is mentioned, it's because something is terribly wrong,” he said. “It's kind of the poster-child for unhappy.”

“How would you know?” I asked him. “You've been married to me for almost twenty-five years, and as far as I can remember, this is the first time the
D
word has ever even dropped into a discussion.”

I was right about that.

Sam nodded.

“So why has it dropped in today?” he asked.

That question momentarily stumped me. It wasn't that easy to explain. I took a sip of coffee and then looked thoughtfully into the eyes of the man who had been my partner for more than half of my life.

“Things are different now, Sam,” I said. “With Lauren out of college, married, and Nate as settled as he
probably will ever be, it's as if we've suddenly got our own lives back.”

He shrugged. “We've worked hard, we've done our job as parents and, knock on wood, they've both turned out okay,” he said. “We have every reason to be proud of that. And I'd say we've earned some time on our own.”

“I agree, I totally agree,” I told him. “But it's like a door is opening to a whole new life. I want to know why we should we spend that life together.”

Sam tightened his jaw. I could tell he was getting annoyed.

“I don't understand what you're getting at,” he said. “If it's something that I've done or not done, I think you're going to have to spell it out to me. You know how hard it is for me to figure out what you're thinking.”

“If you met me today, now, this morning,” I asked him, “would you choose to be married to me?”

“Of course,” he answered too quickly.

“No, think about it,” I insisted. “If we were total strangers, just starting out on our own in our midforties, forties, would you want to date me, sleep with me, spend the rest of your life with me?”

Sam folded up the newspaper and laid it on the mottled glass patio table with a snap of irritation. He leaned back in his chair and eyed me speculatively.

“Is this one of those ‘no right answer' questions you women come up with?”

“
We women
didn't come up with this question, I came up with it. This is not some
Cosmo
survey, it's the rest of our life.”

It sounded serious and I wanted it to be.

“So what's your answer?” I persisted. “If you
weren't already married to me, would you want to marry me?”

My husband, Sam, definitely requires some read-between-the-lines skills when expressing his feelings, but he isn't one of those inside-himself kind of guys who can only respond to relationship questions with
yes, no and I dunno
answers. He is actually fairly adept at verbalizing his inner concerns and conflicts. As a husband, Sam has always been able to share with me. I credit part of this ability to his having been raised by his widowed grandmother. He's also had some times when the surface of his life was so rocky that he's had to dig down deep to stay anchored.

And he's dependably honest.

“If you weren't already married to me, would you want to marry me?”

“How can I know?” he answered. “If I hadn't married you, I don't know what kind of guy I'd be. And I don't know what kind of woman you'd be if you'd spent the last twenty-five years somewhere else.”

I nodded thoughtfully.

“Okay, that's a fair enough answer,” I admitted.

He smiled and let out a little sigh of relief.

I shook my head. “But I have to let you know,” I warned him, “I'm not sure that I'm willing to spend the next twenty-five years with you if our only reason for being together is that we always have been.”

His brow furrowed with genuine concern.

“Was my pregnancy the only reason that you married me? Can you even remember how you used to feel about me? What was our getting together all about?”

1977

W
hat was our getting together all about? Well honestly, in the beginning, it was about sex. Or maybe it wasn't really about sex, it was just that time of my life when everything seemed to be about sex. But sex was a part of it, that's obvious. Sex is what changed everything.

It was already over. We were finished as a couple, both of us had moved on, that cool autumn day in October when the crew truck pulled up to the Burger Barn. Corrie was standing beside her mother's blue Lincoln. She glanced up at me, casual but smiling. I knew she was waiting for me.

She was dressed in what I think of as “college girl clothes.” She had on a straight brown corduroy skirt that came to the top of her boots. Her sweater was sort of orange, but so dark that it matched the skirt. She'd tied some kind of long scarf thing around her neck and had a round hat, a beret or a tam-o'-shanter on the top of her head.

She looked good, real good.

I knew then, if I'd never known it before, that Corrie Maynard was way out of my league.

I'd known Corrie all my life, or at least since second
grade. She was two years behind me in school, so maybe the first time I really met her she was in kindergarten. Not that I paid much attention. Girls weren't really on my radar screen at the time, and kids younger than me were beneath my notice. But I knew all of them, of course.

Lumkee, Oklahoma, was a very small town. Everybody pretty much knew everybody. Maybe everybody didn't know me. I really sort of snuck into town and tried not to draw attention to myself. But there wasn't anyone who didn't know Corrie Maynard. Corrie's father was Doc Maynard, the druggist. Maynard Drug was a local Main Street business landmark. It had a long marble soda fountain, the old-fashioned kind where a kid could buy a real ice cream soda for seventy-five cents or vanilla-lime Coke for a quarter.

When we first started dating, Corrie's personal preference was cherry-chocolate Dr. Pepper.

It was football season my senior year when we began going out. I'd never had a real girlfriend. And Corrie wasn't the type that I would have normally even considered. But it was football season and I was riding high.

The great thing about A-conference high school football was that it was a far reach from elite athleticism. With only five hundred kids in the high school, every guy who could walk upright and didn't make the cut for marching band went out for the Varsity Eagles.

I was not exactly on my way to the NFL, but I was bigger than a lot of the guys in my class and I could pass and run pretty good and I was a very tenacious blocker. I made a few plays, got a few cheers. By the homecoming dance I thought I was major hot stuff. And I needed a date.

When that thought occurred to me I was at my locker looking for my Spanish book. I couldn't
habla
worth a flit. The only one in our class who really could was Corrie Maynard. A sophomore!

As it sometimes happens in my brain, those two unrelated thoughts just happened to pop up at the same time, and got sort of weirdly fused together. And by the time I got to class I took the unprecedented step of walking up to her desk (she sat in the front row, of course) and saying, “Do you wanna go to the homecoming dance with me?”

I interpreted her stunned, slack-jawed silence as rejection and had already turned to walk away when she grabbed my arm.

“Yes, yes, I'd love to,” she said, very enthusiastically.

That was the beginning of our high school romance. By the end of football season we were going steady. Over Christmas, we'd declared ourselves in love.

On New Year's Eve, it all came to an abrupt end.

Corrie and I had gone to a dance at the American Legion, and it was late when I took her home. All I remember is driving up Main Street and then waking up to see a tree coming at me.

Although I was rushed to the hospital in Tulsa, I only suffered minor cuts and bruises. I thought Gram's car had taken the worst of it—that is until I was arrested. Because of the date on the calendar and the stupidity of hitting a tree in City Park, the officer assumed I'd been drinking.

Corrie's parents wouldn't let her speak up for me when my case went to Juvenile Court. Gram went with me. And a couple of guys from the team put in a good
word. But when I was asked about my parents, I had no choice but to admit that my father was in prison.

I could see it in the judge's eyes—that settled it for him.

I think the prosecutor had his doubts. He talked to us and suggested that if I volunteered for the army, he'd drop the charges.

I'm sure Corrie's mom was praying I'd be shot dead in some lonely rice paddy. Fortunately, for me, Vietnam was ending. I did my military service in the Canal Zone.

I returned to Lumkee in the spring of 1977. Not to stay, just to see my grandmother, gather my things and head out to the big world. Of course, I couldn't not show up to hear Corrie make her valedictory speech at high school commencement.

She'd written me once a week from the day I'd left. She'd taken up the task of keeping me up to date with the news of Lumkee and its residents. I'd enjoyed her letters, but the gap between us had grown into a chasm. I thought I was a man. I thought she was just a little girl.

That night as she stood on the stage addressing a crowd of nearly a thousand people, she was completely confident, relaxed, persuasive, insightful, wise.

I was blown away.

I can't remember a lot of what she said. It was about how each of us have been touched by lives before us, our parents and grandparents, and we will share that experience through our own lives with the generations still to come. I don't recall much more than that, except at the end of the speech she held her hands out to the audience and said, “Touching me is touching history.”

Suddenly touching Corrie was all I could think about.

I felt exactly the same way that chilly autumn afternoon at the
Burger Barn
when I saw her standing beside her mother's Lincoln.

The whole crew jumped off the back of the truck. Stopping to get a can of pop and a bag of chips for the ride back to town was a daily ritual. The rest of the guys hurried up to the window. I walked over to Corrie.

“Hey, babe, you're looking mighty fine, as always.”

I lowered my mouth to kiss her. She turned her head and my lips landed upon her cheek.

That was troubling. We were, of course, officially broken up. But not because we were angry or finished. We were still in love. We were going to be together always. We just couldn't be together right then.

When she'd gone off to Oklahoma State, her parents had insisted that it didn't make sense for us to continue to see each other exclusively. It was the same argument they'd used when I was in the military. At that time we'd acquiesced without much argument. But it was a harder sell when she went off to college. It was harder because we'd been intimate. Over the summer, we'd started having sex.

Back then people talked about casual sex and free love. There was nothing casual or free about how I felt about Corrie. I was completely committed. I'd sworn undying love. I'd said that I would wait for her forever. And I'd meant it. But I wasn't that crazy about the follow-through.

Corrie professed to love me, but she also wanted to be a journalist. To write for a paper or work at a TV station. That was okay with me. Except that being a jour
nalist required a four-year degree. She'd looked forward to college since childhood. I never told her not to go. I was at least smarter than that. But I wanted her to stay home. If she had to go away, I wanted her to do it as my girlfriend, already spoken for. I didn't want Corrie,
my Corrie,
taking her newfound sexuality and trying it out on college guys in Stillwater. And Corrie didn't want me hanging out at the beer joints among the honky-tonk honeys. We didn't want to break up.

But her mother insisted. College wouldn't be college if Corrie couldn't pledge a sorority, make new friends and date new boys. We'd talked it over for weeks. Corrie argued with her mother and I'd argued with Corrie. Finally we agreed to do what her mother wanted. Corrie always had to do what her mother wanted.

I still loved her, wanted her. When she turned away from my kiss at the Burger Barn, I was hurt.

“What's wrong, babe?” I asked her.

“We've got to talk,” she replied.

“Okay.”

“Get in,” she said, indicating the car.

I glanced at the interior of the baby-blue Lincoln. “I'll get it dirty,” I pointed out. My Sunray DX coveralls had smears of the thick black engine grease that was the daily experience of petroleum production. “And you know how your mother hates the smell of the oil patch in her car.”

Corrie shrugged, unconcerned. “It doesn't matter.”

I knew that it did matter, but I wasn't willing to argue the point.

I opened the driver's side door. Corrie got in and slid all the way across to the passenger's side. I was
never
allowed to drive her mother's Lincoln. And when we went in my grandmother's car (a blue '53 Bel Air), Cor
rie always sat in the middle. Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. And I wasn't all that eager to find out what.

I got behind the steering wheel and gazed over the vast expanse of hood between me and the front bumper. The ignition turned over easy and the powerful roar of the 460 V8 was muted in the plush interior. I loved that car. Normally I would have given my eyeteeth for a chance to drive it. But with Corrie so obviously distracted, I couldn't even enjoy it.

I put the automatic transmission in reverse, backed out of the parking spot and headed for the highway.

“Let's drive up to the river bluff,” she suggested.

The little hill in the bend of the river was an infamous teen hangout and Lover's Lane. This time of day it would most likely be deserted and it would offer a great view of the sunset.

“I can't,” I told her. “I've got to go home and get cleaned up. And Gram will have my dinner on the table. She'll worry if I don't show.”

That last was undoubtedly true, though it was the kind of thing that I never spent a lot of time worrying about. The truth was, I didn't want to go up to the river bluff at sunset with Corrie. It seemed exactly the kind of site that she would choose to break bad news. She had met someone else. I was sure of it. Terrified of it. We were already broken up. I could bear that, because it was her parents standing between us. If she decided that she no longer loved me…well, I wasn't sure I could stand to hear it.

“I really need to talk to you,” she insisted.

“We'll talk,” I said. “But I need to get cleaned up first.”

I drove us into town. I was so distracted that I actu
ally went straight up Main Street, not even having the presence of mind to avoid being seen from the front of her father's drugstore. I went around the city park and turned left on West Hickory and drove the five black-topped blocks to my grandmother's little two-bedroom bungalow.

I had lived with Gram since I was four. That was the year that my mom died and my dad went away. That was the way that I always said it, “My mom died and my dad went away.” That was the truth, but as they said at Daddy's trial it wasn't
the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
My father shot and killed my mother in the middle of an argument on a hot summer night as I lay sleeping in my bed. He said it was an accident. The police said it was murder. The one thing everyone agreed was that my father, Floyd Braydon, was very drunk at the time. From what I've gathered, that wasn't all that unusual.

My father got
twenty-five to life.
I got Gram. She was widowed, almost fifty and still in shock over the loss of her youngest daughter, but she took me in. She drove all by herself down to Odessa, Texas, to pick me up at the child welfare office. I didn't remember her. I'm not sure that we'd ever met. She walked into the building and she might as well have been a total stranger. But she loved me immediately, unconditionally. A kid couldn't have asked for a better deal.

I remember the caseworkers kept talking and talking. They talked about me, but nobody really talked to me. Finally Gram just took my hand.

“Let's go home,” she said.

I didn't realize that she meant
her
home in Lumkee. But I already trusted her so much that I would have followed her anywhere.

Corrie and I didn't say a word to each other as I drove the Lincoln. She just stared out the window with a sad, almost lost look on her face. It was over between us. I was sure of it. And my heart was already breaking.

I pulled into the two rutted dirt tracks that served as the driveway beside Gram's little brown shingled house. I raced around the car to open the door for Corrie. I was almost too late, she had one foot on the ground already before I could offer a hand. She gave me a little smile. It was only tiny, but it gave me hope.

“Good manners will get you a long way in the world,” Gram had taught me.

I hoped it would be enough to keep Corrie beside me.

I held open the white picket gate as she went through. And then clasped her palm as we walked across the yard and up the front porch steps. The screen wasn't latched so I opened it and stuck my head in.

“Gram!” I called out.

“Samuel Braydon,” she answered from the depths of the kitchen. “Don't you be tracking through my house in those dirty work clothes!”

“I'm not,” I assured her. “Corrie's here with me.”

“Corrie?” Gram's tone changed immediately. A minute later she was walking through the living room wiping her wet hands on the hem of the apron tied around her waist. “Corrie! Get in this house, young'un. I have missed the sight of your pretty face.”

Gram was delighted. Her eyes virtually disappeared among the wrinkles as she smiled. She was a little tiny woman, not quite five feet tall in sensible-heeled shoes. Her hair, as always, was pulled away from her face
and twisted into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. Pentecostal Hair, is what Corrie called it. Gram was a Baptist, of course. But her hair, left to grow as long as it would grow and bound up tightly by day, was definitely Pentecostal.