Suburban Renewal (3 page)

1978

T
he first year of my marriage was no easier than we deserved. Mrs. Maynard, once convinced that she couldn't stop us, took over the plans for the wedding. It was small, only close friends and family, held in the huge First Methodist Church. Corrie wore a pale blue suit with a matching hat. The outfit kind of reminded me of an Easter egg. But she looked real pretty, like always.

I asked her brother, Mike, to be my best man. Well, I admit, Mrs. Maynard suggested him as the best choice. I guess she didn't want to see any of the guys I hung out with standing up with us. That was okay with me. I couldn't have picked out any of my buddies as particularly special. Corrie was, and always had been, my best friend. And since she was standing on the other side of me, well, it really didn't matter.

Mike had come home from Kansas City where he was in pharmacy school. He was a tall, athletic, really nice-looking guy and a sharp dresser. So it seemed appropriate to ask him to help me come up with something to wear. My choices were a brown corduroy sports jacket or my high school suit, which was now way too tight across the shoulders.

“I've got some money,” I told him. “I can buy a new suit. I just hate to spend my savings, knowing we've got hospital bills ahead of us.”

He came down to see me, carrying an old suit of his. It was in perfect shape and the most expensive thing I'd ever had on my back. He claimed it didn't fit him anymore. It didn't fit me, either. But Gram got her pincushion out of the sewing box and by the morning that I slipped that plain, fifty-dollar gold band on Corrie's finger, I had the nicest, best-fitting suit I ever owned.

But the truth is, I have trouble thinking of that date, the wedding date, November 5, 1977, as the beginning of our marriage.

It wasn't just that I didn't get to have sex on my wedding night. I'm sure there are plenty of guys who share that bad luck. But I hardly saw Corrie before the ceremony or after. When the guests went home, Mrs. Maynard told me to go home, too. Corrie was sick. That was probably true. Corrie was sick a lot. That was why we hadn't bothered with a honeymoon. But she couldn't have been sick every minute!

The next day Corrie had to get back to school. Edna Maynard was adamant that her daughter finish the semester. So after one hasty, supervised kiss in the driveway of her parents' house, Corrie went back to Stillwater and I went back to Gram.

I was lonely, immediately lonely. It was really weird. I'd been single always and had never felt alone. Now I was barely married and she was sixty miles away and I felt this sad emptiness without her.

Since Gram believed that long distance was only used in emergencies, I stopped down to the phone booth on the park end of Main Street every day after work and called my wife. I knew she was scared and
having doubts. I was scared, too, but I had no doubt about what I wanted. I wanted Corrie and our baby. I was determined to make it happen.

I had a lot of free time. A full-time job only takes forty hours a week. Now a married man with a child on the way, I quit wasting my nights in beer joints and honky-tonks. I was thinking about all that free time and about how hard I needed to work to keep Corrie and the baby with me. Those two thoughts sort of melded into the idea of making more of what I was doing. I started taking extra jobs after work; lots of independents couldn't really afford to pay time and a half for a well-service company on nights and weekends. So I picked up little jobs charging day rates. It wasn't that I loved oil wells so much, it's just that's what I knew how to do.

You might have thought that my boss, Cy Walker, wouldn't want the competition. But back then, there was more work than anyone wanted and he was glad to share some of it with me after I clocked out.

I gave my phone number to everybody I knew and told them that if they had an engine down, or they needed somebody after regular hours, I was available, even in the middle of the night. I jokingly began to call myself the Midnight Mechanic. I even had some cards printed up with that name. It was funny, but people remembered it. I got calls during the ten o'clock news or at three in the morning. I was young and strong and pretty much sleepless those days, anyway, so I never missed a call.

With the extra money, I surprised Corrie at Christmas with the keys to a two-bedroom furnished duplex only four blocks from her mother's house. I figured out pretty quick that Mrs. Maynard had decided that Cor
rie and I should be kept apart until the baby was born. Then once her grandchild was legitimate, a nice clean divorce would be the fix-up for Corrie's life. I was determined not to let that happen.

When Corrie came home for Thanksgiving, there was a question about whether or not I was even going to be invited for dinner. Fortunately, Corrie insisted. But every time I brought up any discussion about the future, Mrs. Maynard would change the subject. I finally just asked her straight out.

“Where is Corrie going to live after she comes home from college?”

Mrs. Maynard, always dressed up like she was going to church, and so smug in her superiority, managed to look down at me even across the table.

“In her condition, Corrie needs to be close to her mother,” she stated.

I knew she meant that as an explanation of why Corrie would never live with me. Right then I took it as a challenge to find a place that we could afford, so near to the Maynard's house that nobody could complain.

I managed to do it.

The duplex was shabby and run-down. But I cleaned it up until it shone like a new penny. Gram took charge of the kitchen, getting all her friends from the Baptist Ladies' Auxiliary to each donate one pan. She embroidered dish towels with Sam and Corrie on them and hung them from the back of the chairs of the three-piece dinette. And she bought a secondhand high chair that she had me sand and stain to match the furniture.

When Corrie saw the place, she started crying. At first I thought it was bad crying, but then I realized it was happy crying.

“I love you, Corrie,” I told her. “I will always take care of you. I will always provide for you.”

I meant those words when I said them. She must have believed me. Because she moved in with me. I guess I'd say our marriage started that day. December 25. That's when we finally had a commitment.

Corrie encouraged me to continue doing the Midnight Mechanic work on the side, though now I really wanted to stay home with her. I wanted to spend my time talking to her. And I worried about leaving her alone at night. She wouldn't hear of it.

“Mom's four blocks away and I'm perfectly capable of using a phone,” she assured me. “Besides, the only time a poor newlywed wife like me gets any rest is when her man isn't home!”

She was teasing, of course. But I let her get away with it.

As it happened, when she went into labor she didn't have to call her mom, I was neither at work nor on call.

It was a sunny spring Saturday. We were working together in our driveway. Corrie had given me the idea of putting Midnight Mechanic and our new phone number on the sides of my truck. We didn't want to spend the money for a sign painter, but we didn't want a really homemade job. So we cut a stencil on butcher paper, taped it to the door and we were dabbing the paint on. Suddenly Corrie doubled over in pain.

“What happened? Did you get a stitch in your side?”

“It's the baby,” she answered.

“The baby!” I hollered. “It's not time for the baby. Is it the baby? Let's get to the hospital. Come on, get in the truck, get in the truck.”

Corrie refused. “No, no, I don't want to go yet,” she told me. “Let's finish painting this door.”

“Finish painting the door?” I said. “While you're in labor?”

“Firstborns take forever,” she assured me. “That's what everybody I've talked to says—labor averages ten to fourteen hours. I don't want to go to the hospital until it's closer.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure,” she said. “Let's paint the door.”

We painted the driver's-side door. Then she insisted that we paint the passenger-side door. I was so nervous I thought I might throw up, but Corrie took her time. She didn't get ahead of herself. When we were finished, I ran in and grabbed her suitcase and started up the truck.

When she didn't come out immediately, I went back inside to find her coming out of the shower.

“What are you doing?”

“I can't get examined if I'm dirty,” she told me.

She called the doctor and assured him that she was fine. He agreed to meet us at the hospital.

“Aren't you going to call your mom?” I asked her.

Corrie shook her head. “I don't want them pacing the floor all day at the hospital,” she said. “We'll call them when we know we're close.”

I had to help her get dressed.

“These pains are coming really close together,” I said.

Corrie waved away my concern. “It takes forever to have a baby, everybody says so.”

She had me drive through the Sonic to get her a soda pop with extra ice.

“They won't let you have anything to drink in the labor room,” she explained.

By the time we got to the hospital she was in a lot of
pain. We parked the car in the lot and walked in through the front door. Took the elevator to the maternity floor. Corrie was leaning on me pretty heavily. We made our way to the nurses' station.

“My wife's in labor,” I told them.

The nurse looked up, gave us both a quick, unconcerned once-over.

“How close together are the pains?”

“They're pretty much constant, I think,” I told her.

The woman's brow furrowed a bit.

“Let's get her into the labor room and examine her,” she said.

We were directed into a small, windowless mauve room. All the clothes that I'd helped her get on at home, I had to help her get off now. She was suffering pretty tremendously.

After one long, tough pain, she looked up at me, frightened.

“I can't even imagine how bad it's going to be, if it hurts this much now,” she said.

A nurse, different from the one at the desk, came in and we helped Corrie into the bed.

“The doctor is coming in to examine her,” she told me. “This would probably be a good time for you to go down to the business office and fill out the admission forms.”

“I'll be right back,” I told Corrie.

She barely responded, concentrating hard upon the pain she was in.

I met Dr. Kotsopoulos at the door. We shook hands and I told him where I was headed. He told me not to worry.

I got directions from the nurses' station and was
standing at the elevator door when the nurse from the room came hurrying down the hall calling out to me.

“Mr. Braydon! Mr. Braydon.”

“Yeah?”

“The doctor wants you to get scrubbed and suited up,” she said.

“I haven't been to admissions yet,” I explained.

“That can wait,” she said.

Obviously not everything could.

The nurse took me to wash up. I was dressed in a paperlike yellow gown as well as a blue paper shower cap and shoe covers.

I heard Corrie before I saw her.

“You can do it,” Dr. Kotsopoulos said. “Come on, Corrie.”

“Where's Sam?” she screamed.

“I'm here, I'm here,” I assured her, hurrying to her side. I grabbed her hand. Her palm was sweaty but cold.

“We're crowning,” Dr. Kotsopoulos said. “Hold it, Corrie, don't push yet. Don't push.”

“I gotta push!” she hollered back.

“Don't push!” he repeated.

She looked up to me, her eyes pleading. “I gotta push.”

“Corrie, you can do anything you have to do,” I told her. “If you have to not push, then I know that you won't.”

She groaned like some animal and squeezed my hand so hard, I thought it might break my fingers.

“Okay,” the doctor said. “Next contraction you can push.”

The man had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth when she was bearing down.

“Here he comes,” the doctor said. “Here he comes. You'd better look this way, Dad, or you're going to miss it.”

The nurse tapped me on the shoulder. The doctor meant
me.
I glanced down just in time to see a big whoosh of something pop out of Corrie's body like soap in a shower.

Dr. Kotsopoulos caught her and the minute he turned her over, she began to cry.

“It's a girl,” he said.

“It's a girl,” I repeated, not sure I even believed my eyes.

“A girl,” Corrie repeated with a sigh. “My mom will be so happy. She wanted a girl.”

When I called Mrs. Maynard a half an hour later, she was anything but happy.

“You took Corrie to the hospital and let her have a baby without calling me!”

“It all happened so fast,” I told her.

“Sam Braydon, I will never forgive you for this!”

I doubt seriously if she ever has.

1979

I
t was bitter cold that morning. I'd dressed Lauren in the little pink snowsuit that my mother got her for Christmas. It was padded and thick, and wearing it, she looked like a stuffed sausage, with just her little round face sticking out.

Mom loved to see Lauren dressed in the clothes she bought. And it was cute, but the stores were about sixty degrees warmer than the sidewalk. So I had to get the snowsuit on and off of her every time we went in or out—which occurred about every twenty minutes. The routine was wearing thin. And worse, it was annoying Lauren. It could have been avoided if we were at one of the fancy shopping malls in Tulsa. With the new expressway opened they were less than an hour away. But for my mother, the February white sales were as much an annual tradition as any religious holiday. And tradition dictated that she celebrate in the meager downtown shops of Main Street, Lumkee.

“Honey, look at these sheets,” she said. “They are thirty percent off and in plenty of colors. We can both buy a couple of sets.”

Mom spent money with a carelessness that I was in no position to match.

“I don't need any sheets, Mom,” I told her.

She looked at me skeptically. “Everybody needs sheets,” she insisted.

“We're still using the ones we got for wedding presents,” I said. “And if I bought more, I'd have to figure out where to store them.”

Sam and Lauren and I were living in a garage apartment that was barely five hundred square feet.

Mom shook her head in disgust.

“Your husband makes you live in some rat hole and you act like a church mouse about it,” she said. “It's time for you to demand your own house. If not for yourself, then for Lauren. A child needs a yard to run and play in.”

“Mother, she can't even walk yet,” I pointed out. “I don't think getting her a backyard is a high priority at this point.”

“She'll be walking any day,” Mom said. “She might have started already but realized there wasn't anywhere to go.”

I rolled my eyes but spoke with deliberate reasonability.

“The apartment is a really good deal for us,” I explained.

Mom sniffed with disapproval. She'd lost interest in the sheets, barely glanced at the towels and had moved on to the china and glassware section. A complete set of fake Christmas Spode was set on a table for ten percent off. Mom was giving it close inspection.

“I never liked that Mrs. Neider,” she said, casually. “Her husband made his money in nightclubs and she didn't play bridge.”

I wasn't sure which flaw my mother thought was the worst.

Mrs. Neider was pretty well off but, at ninety, she needed a lot of help. She allowed us to live in the apartment above her garage for only the cost of the utilities. We paid the rent by helping her out. I did her housework, laundry and cooking. Sam took care of the yard work and odd jobs. She could be cranky and crabby, but more often she was easygoing and kind. She loved Lauren and the two kept each other company while I cooked and cleaned.

“If you're thinking that women is going to die and leave you something, you know you're wrong,” Mom stated emphatically. “She's got five children and a dozen grandkids. Once what she's got is divided among them, there won't be a pittance for any outsider, no matter how hard you've worked for her.”

“We're not hoping to be left anything, Mom,” I told her. “We've got a good deal now. With Sam just getting his business started, we need to keep our family expenses at a minimum.”

Mom was dismissive. “I don't think you can call a truck and a couple of ne'er-do-well employees a business,” she said. “He's a shade-tree mechanic without even a shade tree.”

“It's an oil-well service company, Mom. There is no reason to have a big office somewhere if all their work is done out in the field.”

“He doesn't have an office. He doesn't seem to even have a paycheck. What kind of
work
is this, anyway?”

“Mom, it takes time to get a new business off the ground,” I tried to tell her. “Things are actually going great. He's building a reputation. He's got new customers every day.”

“But he's not making any money.”

“He has a hundred thousand dollars' worth of debt
tied up in equipment and he's got a weekly payroll he has to meet. Starting a business is always a struggle. That's why everybody doesn't do it.”

“Yes,” she said disdainfully. “I suppose most men's first concern is providing for their wife and child.”

She was deliberately being disagreeable. Mom could always be this way, and when she was in the mood there was really no arguing with her. But I tried, anyway.

“Think about when Daddy started in business,” I said. “Those first few years couldn't have been easy.”

Mom turned to look at me. We were exactly the same height, so she raised her chin, making it possible to look down her nose at me.

“Your father waited until he could afford to support a wife before we married,” she said. “He'd finished his degree, had his license and money in the bank before we even thought of starting a family.”

We were back to that. Somehow we always got back to that. My mother's disappointment in my “lapse in judgment” never waned. It was as if every day that passed increased her regret of my failure to finish college. There was nothing I could do about that. No further apology that I could make. I hadn't lived up to her expectations then and I continued to be unable to do so.

Lauren began to get fussy and I suggested that we interrupt shopping for a little lunch. I wrestled the baby back into her snowsuit and we walked down the block and across the street to Cathy's Corner Café. The place was cute and girly but the food they served had to satisfy the appetites of working men, as well. The special of the day was obviously chili. As soon as I stepped inside the smell of it hit me like a brick wall.
The sweat popped up on the back of my neck and my legs felt as if they were made of jelly.

“Get Lauren out of her snowsuit, I've got to go to the bathroom,” I told Mom.

I hurried toward the door marked
Ladies
at the back of the building. I barely got the door locked behind me before I was throwing up in the toilet. I felt better immediately, but that didn't stop the tears from running down my cheeks. I leaned against the cold white bathroom tile and just allowed myself the luxury of a good cry. It didn't last long, but it did feel good.

I washed up at the sink and then dug into my purse/diaper bag for enough makeup to repair the worst of the damage. I studied myself in the mirror. I looked tired. I looked old. I looked pudgy. I looked pale.

I rinsed out my mouth and brushed on more blush. It was the only help I could offer myself. I was twenty years old. I should be at college in the middle of my sophomore year. Instead, I was stuck in Lumkee living in a tiny garage apartment and working as a maid.

Mom wasn't the only one who was a little disappointed with my choices.

I gathered up my things and headed out into the café.

Mom and Lauren had a table in the corner. Lauren was strapped into a high chair and eating crackers. Mom was conversing with the waitress on the obvious beauty and brilliance of her granddaughter. I had to give Mom credit for that. She may have been upset about my pregnancy, but she adored the baby.

“Hi, Cindy, how you doing?” I asked, politely.

Cindy and I were in the same class in high school. But we'd never socialized. I was brainy, involved in everything and relatively popular. She was a lackluster
student with no extracurricular activities who'd gotten pregnant in her junior year.

It was amazing how the distance between our lives had narrowed.

“Your little girl is a real cutey,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I'm hoping my next is a girl,” she told me, patting her belly. “Boys are absolutely the worst and there are no cute clothes for them or nothing.”

I smiled.

“When are you due?”

“August,” she replied. “Wouldn't you know it? I'm going to be big as a house through the hottest part of the summer.”

“I'm sure it will be worth it,” I told her.

Mom ordered the chili special. I chose a very bland grilled cheese sandwich.

“Can you believe that Cindy?” Mom asked when the waitress left. “Bringing another child into the world when she can't support the one she's got now. They say her husband went off on pipeline just to get away from her.”

“That's what
they
say about every wife whose husband goes on pipeline,” I pointed out. “Pipeline is a good living. Guys go on it to make money and their wives miss them when they're gone.”

Mom's expression was skeptical, but she let the subject drop.

I got Lauren's juice out of the diaper bag and poured it into a sippy cup.

“She's drinking apple juice?” Mom asked.

“Yes, I'm trying to wean her,” I admitted.

“Really?” Mom was genuinely surprised. “Well, that is good news. The way you bought into all that La
Leche nonsense, I was worried that the child would be carrying your breast in her lunchbox at school.”

“It's not nonsense, Mother,” I argued. “Breast milk is best.”

“So says the most saggy-titted women in the world,” she replied. “I raised both my children on formula and they've certainly turned out fine. And I did it without any damage to my figure.”

I didn't even want to go into that. I changed the subject.

“What's going on with Mike?” I asked.

Mention of my brother, my all-so-perfect brother, was always guaranteed to distract my mother.

“Michael is doing wonderfully, of course,” she related. “That big city must be a very exciting place for a good-looking single man. I just hope he's ready to settle down to small-town life when the time comes.”

Mike was attending pharmacy school at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. My father's alma mater. He was making top grades and when he graduated next year he was coming back to Lumkee to become a partner in the business with Dad. That would free up Dad for travel. Mom went on lots of trips with widowed friends and tour groups. Dad always felt as if he had to stay home to take care of the drugstore.

“I'm sure Mike will settle right back into Lumkee,” I assured her. “Mike always does the right thing.”

“Yes, he does,” she agreed. “He's smart, ambitious, hardworking, considerate and kind.”

I couldn't argue that. The truth was, I would have loved to resent my brother or be jealous of him. But he was exactly as Mom described. And as a brother, he was unbeatable. He was three years older than me and could easily have made the life of a little sister misera
ble. But he was always caring and we were close. I could count on him for good advice or a sympathetic ear. I cried like a baby when he left for college.

“Mike's a great guy,” I admitted.

“He is,” Mom said. “And that's why all of this is so difficult to understand.”

“What?”

“I raised the two of you in the same house with the same rules and the same expectations. And Mike has always done so well. While you seem so content to settle for such an ordinary, mediocre life.”

“Mom!”

“You're so smart, so attractive, you have so much potential, yet you settle right into working-class motherhood like one of these no-neck sows with an IQ of ninety.”

We'd been over this ground so many times, it was like a routine. I knew my lines perfectly. I would respond with assurance that a university degree could still be had after age twenty-five. That as soon as Lauren was safely in preschool and Sam was making a little money, I'd be starting back to college. My dreams and ambitions had not been given up, they were only temporarily dormant. They were altered, but they had not been destroyed.

I'd grown up thinking I would be a journalist. Like a young, intrepid heroine in one of those well-worn YA books in the public library, I'd be
Corrie Maynard, Girl Reporter.
That had seemed exciting and full of adventure. I would travel to distant places, meet unusual people. I would drink coffee in Paris cafés with artists and communists. Interview chieftains in the thin air of the high Andes. Report my observations of life on a junk in the Yangtze River.

With Sam and Lauren at my side, that life no longer held its appeal. I was not a girl anymore. I was a woman. As a woman, I had other interests. I'd learned so much from motherhood. My daughter was absolutely fascinating, much more so, I was certain, than any foreign potentate. Now I wanted to study Early Childhood Education.

But it seemed that I would not do that, either.

“Mom, I'm pregnant again,” I said calmly.

It is hard to make my mother speechless, but that did it. Her jaw dropped open in shock and she just looked at me incredulously. After a moment, her expression of utter disbelief gave way to defeat. She sat back in her chair, a sigh of exhaustion escaping her.

“Oh, honey, that's impossible,” she said.

“It certainly is possible,” I assured her. “People get pregnant every day.”

“I asked your father if you had a prescription for birth control,” she said. “He assured me that you were up-to-date.”

“Mom, I think it's illegal to spy into my pharmacy records.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, waving my words away. “So call a policeman. How did this happen?”

“In the usual way, Mom,” I told her. “I don't think we need to alert the Vatican.”

“But the pill…”

“I quit taking the pill,” I admitted. “My girlfriends at La Leche explained that all those hormones were getting into Lauren's milk. That's not good. And breast-feeding is a natural contraceptive.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake.”

Mom's response was disdainful and dismissive.