Suburban Renewal (7 page)

“Ah…I don't have any beer here at the house,” I explained. “I can get you some…” I glanced over at Corrie for assistance.

“Iced tea,” she said. “Or juice. I can make some coffee.”

He shook his head. “No, that's fine,” he said.

Corrie scurried off to the kitchen and my father was walking around the living room, looking everything over.

“This is a damn fine house, son,” he told me.

I beamed with pride. “We just moved in May 6. It's brand new.”

“Nice, real nice,” he assured me.

“Have a seat,” I told him, offering my new Nauga-hyde lounger. “I'll see if I can help Corrie.”

“I always say, ‘Leave the women's work to the women,' but go ahead if you need to. I am getting hungry.”

I left him and went into the kitchen. Corrie was
spooning up mashed potatoes. A skillet of bubbling gravy was on the stove. She did not look happy.

“What's going on?” I asked her.

“You tell me,” she replied.

“Are you mad because we stopped for a couple of beers?”

“I don't care if you want to drink a beer,” she said. “Although I'm glad we don't keep the stuff in the refrigerator.”

“Why are the kids over at your mother's?”

“Why do you think?”

“I have no idea.”

Angrily, she handed me the bowl of potatoes and began pouring gravy into the boat.

“I didn't think the children should be here,” she said.

“Why not?”

The cast-iron skillet banged loudly as she set it back down on the stove.

“Sam,” she said, “sorry to be the one to point this out, but we have a murderer in the living room.”

A low, humorless laugh came from the doorway. My father was standing there.

“Not only shapely, but feisty as well,” he said. “You damn sure got yourself a wife, Sammy.”

A look passed between the two of them. It was pure animosity and distrust on both sides.

“Did your husband tell you that he's offered me a job?” my father asked her. “Looks like I'm going to be working at Braydon Oil Well Service.”

1984

O
ur family, in the years that followed the arrival of Floyd Braydon in Lumkee, was plagued by an abrupt and seemingly insurmountable division of the sexes. It was Lauren and I versus what I called the “Men's Club.”

My daughter, a pretty and precocious second-grader, had been one of the first children chosen for the elementary school's new gifted and talented program. She was tall for her age and a little bit awkward, but she was cute and sweet and bright-eyed. She looked very much like my mom. Therefore it was a certainty that she was going to grow up to be very attractive.

Our time together was golden. We were the perfect mother-daughter team. We cooked together. Read together. Discussed books and concocted science experiments. I was den mother for her Brownie troop. And the mom most likely to spend a Saturday at the amusement park. I loved it. My daughter was happy and biddable. Willing to sing to me as I scrubbed the bathrooms or to sit patiently while I styled her waist-length chestnut hair into a french braid, an elaborate crown or a punk-rock do.

She'd inherited my mom's love of shopping. And
fortunately, Sam's business was doing well enough for her to do a lot of it. We hardly wasted our time with the flimsy offerings of Lumkee's downtown Main Street. Lauren and I haunted the malls of south Tulsa where we could buy Calvin Klein jeans and Izod shirts. For Lauren that was the second-grade uniform. If, in the silence of my soul, I worried about the appropriateness of a seven-year-old wearing Charlie perfume and Lee Press-On Nails, I never voiced it aloud. Lauren was my gal pal, my best buddy.

I needed her.

Sam was no longer there for me, he was busy with his
dad.

Floyd and I had nothing to say to each other. Sam and his father never stopped talking. They spent the weekdays together. Floyd was quickly promoted to superintendent. A position where he had the authority to watch everyone else do the work, not being particularly interested in actually working himself.

“He's an old man, Corrie,” Sam responded when I pointed this out. “His joints are stiff and he doesn't see as well as younger men.”

Floyd managed, however, to get drunk and dance at honky-tonks every Saturday night. And his vision was good enough for him to give the eye to every female between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five.

He ate dinner with us three or four times a week. I didn't like that, either.

“Dad appreciates a good meal, Corrie,” Sam told me. “You should be flattered that he's so partial to your cooking.”

Weekends for the guys were filled with hunting, fishing, watching sports or going to gun shows.

My disapproval made it all worse. I complained that
Sam was wasting his time. So he bought a freezer and filled it with dead birds, venison and bass. I didn't want the two of them sitting around my living room. So Sam bought his dad a big TV and spent his time there.

When I found out that Sam had bought his father a handgun (for protection), I threatened to contact Floyd's parole officer. Sam brought home the semiautomatic .45 to store in our bedroom closet!

The thing I hated most, however, was not Sam's idolization of the man he never really knew. I hated my father-in-law being with my son.

From the very beginning, I tried to keep the children away from Floyd. With Lauren that was no problem. He didn't even seem to notice her. But Nate and his paw-paw were immediately inseparable. Maybe it was some kind of genetic-link thing. Unlike Sam or Lauren, Nate actually favored his grandfather. He had Floyd's eyes and his big toothy grin. And they both had that sort of casual charismatic charm that attracted people to them.

The last thing that I wanted, however, was for my son to grow up to have a life that in any way resembled that of Floyd Braydon's. I did everything I could to separate the two of them. But it was a losing battle to try to protect my five-year-old from the influence of his grandfather. I fought it, anyway. I fought it daily. That actually made it worse.

Floyd took it as a challenge. Quietly, diabolically, everything Floyd did was designed to undermine my authority.

It wasn't like he said to Nate, “Don't listen to your mother.” He was much too clever to do anything so direct. But in every interaction between the two of us, I
felt diminished, disregarded. And my son picked up on that. All things female were disparaged.
Pitiful
was the word Floyd most often used for anything to do with the feminine gender. Nate began using the word to describe almost anything broken, intricate or pretty.

“Can't you see the way Floyd treats me?” I asked Sam. “Can't you see how he treats women?”

He just stared at me, clueless. “Dad goes out of his way to be polite. You're the one that's always making some nasty comment,” he replied. “And women love Dad. Every single woman in the county has got him in her sights, and the ones in town are dogging him night and day.”

That was an exaggeration, of course. But I could hardly argue that Floyd wasn't popular with the ladies. Even among those who knew of his prison record there was fawning and primping in his presence.

“He's driving a wedge between me and my son,” I said.

“Little boys like to be with their grandpas. There is nothing wrong with that. It's natural.”

“It's not natural to have a grandfather who's a murderer.”

Sam rolled his eyes as if my statement were ludicrous.

“My mother's death was a terrible accident,” he says. “Dad took responsibility for that. And he's paid his debt to society. You can't hold it against him forever.”

I was pretty sure that I could.

I looked for natural allies in the family. My first choice was Gram. The two of us had grown close spending Sundays together. She was too frail to make her own way to church, so Lauren and I now gave up
the relative chicness of First Methodist to accompany Sam's grandmother to the tiny clapboard chapel that housed the Ninety and Nine Baptist Fellowship. Despite the name, we rarely saw more than forty people at worship. After the service we would, as Gram put it, “scare up a little lunch” together. There was always potatoes and pickled beets, crowder peas and raisin pie. Lauren loved Gram's kitchen. And I have to admit, her home was somehow a haven of serenity and peace in my complicated world.

But her own life was not without flaw. She had good reason to hate Floyd Braydon. And she did.

“It's not Christian,” Gram admitted to me one morning as she sat in her overstuffed upholstered rocking chair with the crochet arm covers. “But I still hate the man.”

The last winter had been hard on her, that or Braydon's return to town. Though she always put on a smiling, cheery facade, I knew that these days she sat in her chair more than she puttered around her house. That long braid of silver hair twisted at the back of her head was pure white now and her hands trembled as they lay at rest upon her lap.

“Floyd Braydon turned my child away from me,” she told me sadly. “He took that precious girl far from home and friends and family. He poisoned her life with whiskey and bad companions. And finally he killed her in a drunken rage.” Gram shook her head and stared off into the empty depths of her stuffy, overheated living room. “‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,'” she quoted. “That's what my Bible tells me. Still, I lie in bed at night wishing I could see that man lying in a casket, cold as clay.”

The pain in her words cut close to my heart, though my aspirations for his future were not as fatal.

“I just want him out of our lives,” I told her.

She sighed heavily. “He will be, Corrie. I'm sure of that. His kind never really settle, they always move along.”

Her submission to the status quo was not what I wanted. I needed her to actively work with me against Floyd Braydon.

“Aren't you worried about Sam?” I asked her. “It's not good for him to be around Floyd. The man is bad. Sam thinks he's rehabilitated, but we know that he's still the man he always was. What if he leads Sam into…into sin.”

I felt weird saying that word, but I felt like I had to translate my fears, which were somehow wordless, into Gram's vocabulary.

“He will,” she admitted nodding. “He's already brought a world of temptation into that boy's life. Sam is changing. He doesn't visit me like he used to. He doesn't believe as he once did.”

“Doesn't that worry you?”

“The Bible says to ‘train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old he will not depart from it.' The part that a lot of folks fail to listen to is that teensy word
old.
I raised Sam to do right and I have faith that ultimately he will live up to his raising. I won't live to see it. I'm like an ancient Moses on Mount Nebo. I've got to trust that God keeps his promises in this world as I ready myself for the next.”

The strength of her faith or her fatalism almost broke my heart.

Without Gram's assistance, I turned to my own family. That brought even less help.

“I'm not interfering between a father and his son,” my dad told me.

“I don't like Braydon, either,” my brother Mike admitted. “But he's your husband's father, Corrie. It's time you learned to get along with him.”

The worst advice came from my mother.

“Honey,” she said. “I think you'd feel better about everything if you'd lose some weight. When a women starts feeling pudgy, nothing in the world suits her.”

I didn't actually feel pudgy, though I had put on about twenty pounds since high school. Since my body was one thing in my life that I could control, I began dieting.

I bought a gym membership to Cherry Dale's Pepxercise and began doing step aerobics and weight lifting. I quit marking my day around the hands of the clock and based my waking hours on calorie consumption. Monday through Friday, one thousand calories. Weekends twelve-hundred. Every third week, I did a liquid-protein fast.

I couldn't lose Floyd Braydon, but I dropped the twenty pounds, plus ten more in a little over two months. And it was really even more than that, because I had developed tremendous muscle strength and muscles weigh more than fat.

I loved being at the gym and I began spending more and more time there. Cherry Dale and I even began to become confidantes of a sort. Though she was three years older than me, she looked younger. She was as spirited and athletic as when she'd been a Lumkee High School cheerleader ten years earlier. And she wore the cutest workout clothes; rugged but revealing spandex, striped or printed in pink and lavender. It
was like doing squats and crunches with Barbie herself.

At first we just shared exercise tips and diet warnings. But eventually that led to more personal discussions.

Her boys, Harlan and Rusty, were each one year older than Lauren and Nate. We were able to share frustrations and insights as well as personal gossip.

“Are you still seeing that guy from Perkins?” I asked her.

Cherry Dale shook her Princess Di hairdo.

“No, he's all tight with some giggly clerk in his office,” she told me. “The woman's butt is as big as the grill on a Mack truck, but there is no accounting for what men want.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“Well, you know my brother is still available,” I pointed out. “You two are such good friends. It would be nice if that could blossom into something more.”

She gave me a startled look. She was surprised, I assumed, that I looked favorably upon her relationship with my brother. I'm sure we both knew that my mother was no fan of hers.

Cherry Dale covered her surprise with a nervous laugh.

“Mike and I have already crossed the line,” she said. “You know, that invisible line. We know each other too well as friends to ever get sappy in love with each other.”

“A lot of good marriages are not based on being sappy in love,” I pointed out, thinking about my own.

She nodded. “Yeah, that's true. But the ones that aren't eventually lose their luster and just fall apart.”

That statement hung with me as the days passed.

Was that happening to my own marriage? Was my husband drifting away from me? Was our life together falling apart?

Certainly a case for that could be made. I was looking so good these days that teenage boys whistled at me when I stopped by the grocery store wearing my leotard. Yet my husband hardly seemed to notice. His attention seemed almost exclusively focused on his work, Floyd and the kids, in that order. I guess I was lucky to come in the top five.

If he was never home, then I decided that I should go to where he worked. I hit Sam up for a job in the office.

“You don't need to bother with that,” he assured me. “You've got more than enough to do hauling the kids around and keeping the house going.”

“I want to get a job,” I assured him. “Mike's been telling me for ages that I should do that. If you won't let me work for you, I'll work for someone else.”

Sam finally agreed and I found myself ensconced in the little office helping out part-time three days a week. The work was dull, boring monotonous filing. And my presence made Vicky, the office manager, nervous. I guess she thought I didn't trust her, or that I was after her job.

I saw my husband breeze in and out of the office twice a day. And I had Floyd Braydon hanging around constantly critiquing my work. It was hardly the solution I'd hoped for. Within a few weeks I gave my notice, telling anyone who would listen that I was completely content with my
real
job as wife and mother.

I don't think my brother believed me. But he didn't say so. Instead he offered other advice.

“Get a weekend away,” Mike suggested. “You two never even had a honeymoon. Sam's making great
money these days. He can afford to take you somewhere first class.”

The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that Mike was right. We did need some time away. We did need to have our honeymoon after all.