Suburban Renewal (11 page)

“No, no, she was all alone. I don't think she's told anybody. Probably too embarrassed by her own stupidity. Women drivers,” Dad commented, warming up to the subject. “It's downright scary to have 'em on the road. Cherry Dale's just fine. She'll be back out on the highway in a couple of days, as bad at it as ever.”

There was some lingering question that niggled at my brain, but I ignored it. I had something important that I had to bring up. I glanced around the room. There was certainly no sense of privacy here. Maybe this wasn't the place to bring it up, but I felt as if I couldn't wait longer.

“Dad, we need to talk,” I told him.

“What about?” His question was gruff, defensive.

“About the house,” I said.

“What house?”

“Gram's house,” I said. “I'm going to borrow some money against it.”

He looked at me, strangely guarded.

“Oh, yeah?” he asked evenly.

I nodded. “My business loan is up for renewal,” I explained. “We haven't really been making enough money to make the payment. Normally, a guy would just go in at this point and renegotiate. But with the entire industry in such terrible shape, the banks have their backs against the wall. They're going to want some more collateral to sweeten the pot. I've already got a second on my house. Gram's house isn't much, but I think it will keep them from calling the loan.”

He took another long draw on his beer, followed by a breathy sigh.

“Not a good idea,” he said.

I was a little surprised at his response, but it was not completely unexpected. I'd learned working with him over the last few years that Dad was what they called in the oil fields a
size forty-seven jacket with a size five hat.
Healthy and strong, but not too clear on the complexities of the business.

“Well, in fact, Dad,” I told him gently, “it's a very good idea.” I took a deep breath, glanced around to make sure nobody was paying any particular attention and then continued. “The downturn in the price of oil is severe. But it's not going to last forever. The businesses that manage to stay in business through this crisis are going to come out of it bigger and stronger and with a larger market share. I want to be one of those businesses.”

Part of the time Dad was looking at me. Part of the time he was looking at his beer.

“The bank doesn't really want to bankrupt me,” I explained. “They've already got enough foreclosure equipment to make the stuff almost completely worthless. All they need is a tiny excuse to keep me on. Just a small piece of real property to give them cause to renegotiate my loan. If I can get another year, maybe I can pull out of this. I'm just trying to buy a little time.”

Dad continued to look at me, saying nothing.

I glanced around nervously again and then lowered my voice. I hated even speaking the next words aloud.

“The alternative is that I go in there with nothing but a drooping balance sheet and a big smile,” I said. “That won't get us anything. They'll call in my loan and I
won't be able to pay. I'll lose the business, Dad. I'll lose everything. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

He nodded slowly. He set down his beer and lit up a cigarette.

“I get it,” he said. “Oh, I get it completely. I'm supposed to lose my house so you won't lose yours. That's it, isn't it?”

“No.”

“That's exactly it,” he insisted. “I give you my damn house to prop up your fly-by-night business. I get nothing so you can get everything.”

I was shocked, even stunned by his words. Six months earlier I had given him the house, just signed it over because he'd asked me for it. He'd never even lived in the place and now he talked like I was trying to cheat him somehow.

“It won't be for nothing,” I assured him. “Putting up collateral is like putting money in the company. I'll give you a partnership, like Corrie's brother, Mike. It will be your company as well.”

“Big freaking whoop-ee,” Dad said facetiously. “Like I want a part of a company that's about to go belly-up?”

“We're not going belly-up.”

“You are if I don't hand over my house,” he said.

“You don't have to hand anything over,” I said. “You'll still have the house. It will just have its address listed on the loan papers.”

“And what happens next time you can't make the payment?” he said. “Then they take my house. No way. It's not worth the risk to me.”

“Dad, this is your job as well,” I said. “If the company goes down, you're out of work.”

He snorted. “I never much liked the damn job, anyway.”

I couldn't believe what he was saying. I couldn't believe that he wasn't willing to help me. And his crappy comment about the job just went through me like ice. I was suddenly furious.

“I pay you twice what anybody else in this town—what anybody else in this state—would pay you. And if you had been anyone else but my father, I would have fired you for being the lazy, incompetent, son of a bitch that you are.”

My anger delighted him. He laughed. “So you can get pissed off, I see,” he said. “I was beginning to think that you were completely candy-ass like your mother. At least that's good. I got something out of this thing. I got a smelly old woman's house and a rise out of my son. That's more than I ever hoped to get from that side of the family.” He rose to his feet. “You don't have to fire me,” he said. “I was getting ready to quit, anyway. That woman of mine makes a pretty nice dollar. I don't need to punch a damn time clock anymore.”

He got up and walked out the door.

I followed him and stood on the sidewalk as he got into his pickup and drove away.

I went to my own car, sat down in the driver's seat and grasped the steering wheel with both hands to keep them from trembling. My heart was pounding as if I'd just run a marathon. The stress of the last months swelled up in me and I wanted to just sit there and cry. I wanted to cry like a little boy.

As a little boy, of course, I hadn't cried. The memories suddenly came back to me in a flood that washed all the optimism out of my brain. Dad's smiling face and charming stories were always for somebody else.
When he came home to us, he was mostly mean. He'd get mad about something, nothing, anything, and he'd slap me hard. If I cried, he'd slap me harder.

“Crybaby! Crybaby, just a crybaby like your mama!”

He did the same to her. She tried to please him, but she never could. When he'd hit her and she'd cry, it made him want to hit her harder. It was just the way he was. He was a bully. Exploiting weakness was like a drug to him. The more he did it, the more he wanted it.

In all my worrying, plotting, planning, maneuvering, I had tried to think of every possibility, every situation that could go right, every detail that could go wrong. In all of those, I had taken comfort in my fall-back position. Never had it occurred to me that my fall-back would be foiled. I had allowed myself to be deluded by Dad. To believe that he was a man like me, rather than the man he was. He had let me down. But it wasn't his fault. He was only what he was, and at least now I was pretty clear on what that meant.

The fault was mine. I was the one who'd given Gram's house away. I had lost my own business. I had no one to blame but myself.

The truth was so painful to me that I could hardly hold it in my mind. My thoughts kept pushing away from it, wanting to focus on anything, anything but the reality of where I'd gone wrong.

It was at that precise moment when I figured out the question that had niggled at my brain earlier. If Cherry Dale had been in a car wreck, how come there wasn't a scratch on that Firebird?

1987

W
hite noise. That's how I think of my recovery from depression. I had been drowning in blackness. Until I was dragged into the world of white noise.

It was Mike and my dad who got me help. Mom just kept yelling at me. Ordering me to snap out of it. Accusing me of faking it to attract attention. Claiming that my deliberate agenda was meant solely to embarrass her among her friends.

I didn't even have the strength to fight back.

I knew the children were suffering. Nate drew even further away from me. He kept his distance as if I had the plague. Lauren seemed to want to emulate my role. If she was playing, giggling, laughing, I'd see her stop herself, as if she believed that being an ordinary happy child was somehow bad behavior.

I could see this. I could see what I was doing. But I couldn't seem to stop. I couldn't drag myself out of the abyss. I just wanted to sit in the garage in Gram's chair. I just wanted to sit there until I could die. It was too hard to face living anymore.

“You need to be on medication,” Mike told me. “You have to see a doctor. This can't go on.”

“I can't see a doctor,” I told him. “What would Mom say? What would Sam say?”

“Mom knows when to keep her mouth shut,” Mike insisted. “And Sam's the one who called us for help.”

I told him I would do it. But I made no moves in that direction. Mike took the reins out of my hands. He made the appointment. He told me when I had to be there. Then he showed up to take me.

I was still in my bathrobe.

“I can't go today,” I told him. “I don't even feel well enough to dress.”

“Then don't,” Mike said. “You can go just like that.”

“I can't go see some stranger dressed in my bathrobe.”

“This doctor is a friend of mine,” he told me. “The guy's seen just about everything. I don't think he'll be fainting from shock at the sight of a housewife in a bathrobe.”

Just that threat got me to bathe and dress. I looked like hell. All my muscles had turned to fat. The only dress in my closet that fit me was a muumuu that Mom had brought me three years earlier from her Hawaiian vacation. My hair was styleless, dull and overlong. The best I could manage was to run a brush through it and pull it into a ponytail at the nape of my neck. My makeup-free skin was so pale and sallow, I almost looked jaundiced. But when I opened my cosmetics case, with the intention of at least putting on some foundation, the process seemed so difficult that I gave up without even starting.

Mike took me in his car. On the new expressway, the drive into Tulsa was barely twenty minutes. And Mike found his way unerringly.

“You drive in Tulsa as if you live here,” I told him.

“I do,” he told me. “Lumkee is more a suburb than a small town these days. I come down this way three or four nights a week.”

“Are you seeing someone special?” I asked him.

He grinned at me. “You've still got that Mom gene,” he said. “No, Edna, no one special.”

I smiled. It was the first time in a long time.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Muldrew, put me on an anti-depressant the first day and started me on weekly therapy. Mike had to take me to my first few appointments, where I mostly just sat and cried through my thirty-minute session.

As definitively as turning on a light switch, after thirty days on the medication, I was suddenly out of the darkness and into the white noise. I drove myself then. I chatted through the sessions, baring my deepest darkest secrets. My anger at Mom for not loving me enough. My love/anger conflict about my brother being the favorite. My disappointment in myself for not making anything of my life. My uncertainty as to whether I really loved my husband.

Dr. Muldrew listened, nodded, took notes.

He was an interesting guy. The first openly gay man I had ever met. It made me feel sort of sophisticated, as if I was stepping out of the ordinary, boring world I'd grown up in. I was curious and I asked him about it.

“Is my sexual preference going to be a problem for you?” he asked.

“No, oh no,” I assured him. “I just find it interesting. I mean, I've never actually met anyone gay before.”

“Really?”

“Really. I mean, I live in Lumkee,” I pointed out. “Nobody is gay in Lumkee.”

He nodded only slightly and then wrote something in his notes before changing the subject.

For most of the rest of that year, I took my medicine, went to my sessions and lived in the world of white noise.

If I noticed that Sam's world seemed a good deal different, it didn't make much of an impact. He was home every night, working at his desk. I'd walk by and see him poring over papers, checkbooks, contracts. I'd wake in the middle of the night to hear the adding machine going.

He told me that he was worried about the business. It was a bad time for everybody. You could hear that all over town. I knew that Floyd was no longer working for him. That was good news. And I assumed that firing his father was what had led to the distance between the two. Gone were the days when the two spent their every waking moment together.

Of course, Floyd continued to see Nate. I would drive him over there nearly every Saturday morning. Unlike every other child in elementary school, my son preferred Paw-Paw to cartoons.

One day in July, Sam came home in the middle of the afternoon. I was looking through cake recipes, wanting to plan something special for Nate's birthday. He stopped in front of my chair and just stood there until I looked up.

“It's over, Corrie,” he said.

My heart flew to my throat. I thought he was divorcing me.

“What's happened?” I asked, suddenly shaken, frightened, regretful.

“The bank's called my loan,” he answered. “I can't pay. I've lost the business, and with it, all our assets,
our savings, your brother's money, this house. It's all gone. We're broke and I'm unemployed.”

Relief flooded through me. Sam wasn't leaving. I was amazed at myself for having jumped to such a conclusion. A very inappropriate little chuckle bubbled through to the surface.

“Oh, is that all,” I said.

“Is that all?” Sam repeated loudly. “Good God, Corrie, is that you talking or those happy pills you take? We've lost it all, everything we've worked for, everything we've wanted for our kids. We're destitute. We haven't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out. We're going to be out on the street, living under a bridge, trying to raise our children while carting all our worldly goods around in a stolen grocery cart.”

He was so scared, so overwhelmed with it, my heart went out to him. Immediately, I rose to my feet, wrapped my arms around him and pulled him tightly against me.

“Shh, it's going to be okay,” I told him. “Samuel, listen to me. It's going to be okay. Shh, it's going to be okay.”

My comforting seemed to help him. He got a grip on himself and regained his composure, but he continued to hold me. After a long moment he spoke.

“Did you hear what you called me?”

“What?”

“You called me Samuel,” he said. “That's what Gram always called me.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess she did.”

“Do you know what it means? The name Samuel?”

“No.”

“Gram said it meant ‘a man with a special calling,'” he said. “It made me believe that I might do something
special. I'm glad she didn't live to see this. She would have been so disappointed.”

Sam's eye's welled up with tears; he was gritting his teeth to hold them back.

“That's the stupidest thing you've ever said, Samuel Braydon. And believe me, I've known you long enough to have heard you say plenty of stupid stuff.”

I smoothed his forelock away from his face.

“Gram was always proud of you and none of it ever had anything to do with money or business or anything we could own,” I reminded him. “She was proud of you because you are an honest, hardworking, honorable man. Nothing about that has changed. Nothing about you has changed. We've got each other. We've got two great kids. We've got our health. This business, this house, all the rest of this, it's just stuff. We'll kick the dust off our sandals and move on.”

It was brave talk. I meant it. I meant it that day. And more as the weeks went by.

Newspapers talk about how stock markets
crash.
But they talk about families
sliding
into poverty. Our family's descent into the realms of the unmonied was definitely on the crashing side of
slide.

The day he told me about the loan we were down to less than one hundred dollars in our checking account. Within a week, a stranger had come in the middle of the night to repossess my minivan. Coming to grips with losing the house was made easier when the gas, electricity and water were shut off. We had a huge yard sale, trying to generate as much cash as we could while making our household goods smaller to cart around.

Fortunately, one of the big advantages of going broke in an economic downturn is that you're not the only one without money. Everybody is in the same
boat. The bank foreclosed on our house. But without any conceivable chance to resell it in the near future, they allowed us to stay in it to keep it from sitting empty until it could be liquidated. We were grateful. Without the house, we'd have been forced to move in with Mike or my parents. We didn't want any more upheaval for the children than was necessary. Knowing that their father didn't have a job was undoubtedly scary enough. Now all we had to do was scrape together enough money each month to keep the utilities on.

Sam was doing his best. He was out job hunting every day. There was no work at all in Lumkee, so he drove to Tulsa to fill out applications, sit for interviews or sometimes just stand at the employment office on Archer Street trying to get picked up for day labor. There was not much luck there. Hundreds of guys waited for the half-dozen pickups that came by to pick up two or three guys with strong backs. Local unemployment had gone from the lowest rate in history—2.9 percent in 1981 to the current high of 9.7 percent. The whole town was like some strange throwback to the depression era.

At least that was my impression on the day of my last visit to Dr. Muldrew. With no company there was, of course, no company health insurance, even if we could have afforded to pay the premiums.

He didn't seem all that surprised. He even suggested that I'd come so far that I really didn't require further therapy, and he put me on a regimen where I slowly decreased the antidepressants until I was off of them completely.

I thanked him and said goodbye.

“I hope that we meet up again sometime under different circumstances,” I told him.

He gave me a little hug and smiled. It was a knockout smile. Dr. Muldrew was one very handsome guy. “I'll tell you the truth, Corrie,” he said. “I'm hoping the exact same thing.”

We shook hands and I left.

I got into my car and headed home. My mind was on a thousand things. I got turned around and lost. I tried to get my bearings, but it was high noon. North, south, east and west, all looked the same to me. When I came across a street that dead-ended into a tank farm, I knew I was way off the beaten track. I stopped at the QuickTrip on the corner to ask directions. The guy working there was eager to strike up a conversation. He was another out-of-work oilman, lucky to have a job.

He got me headed in the right direction for the expressway. I was several miles out of my way. Finally I could see it up ahead of me a couple of blocks away, when I was stopped at a red light.

The sky was gray and overcast. It wasn't cold, but it looked like it should be. As I sat waiting I watched a group of boisterous children playing on a wood-chip-covered playground behind a wire fence high enough for a prison. The place was called Candy Cane School and the front sign was a converted barber pole. I noticed a woman was taping a piece of paper to it. The light turned green just as I realized what the paper read: Help Wanted.

Horns blared and drivers cursed at me as I swerved across three lanes of traffic and, having missed the entrance ramp, bounced over the curb to pull into the front parking lot.

The woman taping up the flimsy homemade sign looked at me, startled, as I got out of my car.

“What kind of job is it?” I called out to her when I was still a half dozen yards away.

She waited to answer until I got closer.

“We need an assistant teacher for the preschool room,” she told me. “We only pay minimum wage and you have to be here at five-thirty in the morning.”

“It sounds perfect,” I told her, offering my hand. If she'd said they needed a plumber I would have responded in exactly the same way.

“I'm Corrie Braydon.”

“Trixie Creekmore,” she said. “I'm the manager.”

“Are you related to any of the Creekmores in Lumkee?” I asked.

She grinned at me. She had a gold filling in one of her eyeteeth.

“Probably my ex was,” she said. “But I sure don't claim none of them folks. I just keep the name for my kid's sake.”

I nodded.

“I'm really interested in the job,” I told her. “I don't have a degree, but I did do some college.”

That was stretching my semester ten years earlier at Oklahoma State. But it didn't seem to bother her.

“We sure don't require college,” she said. “Do you have any experience with children?”

“I have two,” I told her. “A girl, nine, and a boy, seven and a half.”

“Who'll get them ready for school while you're working in the morning?” she asked.

“My husband's out of work.”

She nodded.

“Come on inside, we'll talk,” she said.

Within forty minutes I had the job. I felt as if I was walking on air.

Sam was surprised.

“Are you sure?” he said, his brow furrowing in concern. “I don't want you to have to work if you don't want to. I'm sure to find something soon.”