The Long Journey Home (10 page)

Light from the open kitchen door spilled out onto the squat old woman who stretched her mouth in a broad grin at Bobby as she took our order. He had just told me that he didn’t really love me, that he was breaking up with me forever, and what I took in, what I have forever held inside me, is the image of that old woman, gold fillings flashing in her grinning mouth. That, and the colored lights strung from pecan tree to pecan tree to mark the boundaries of the Blue Gable parking lot.

Margaret Rushin sat at her piano playing the song “I Get Along Without You Very Well” while I sat in the lounge chair next to her, listening. That had become my favorite song since Bobby had cut me off and—I felt—broken my heart forever. The lyrics were about heartbreak and loneliness, and I cherished every syllable.

Margaret was patient with my repeated requests for the song.

She and I had been friends since early childhood when she lived nearby with her family in the home of her Grandmother Wyche, my great-aunt. But not long after I’d grown accustomed to playing with Margaret at her grandmother’s, her parents built a new house several blocks away beyond the elementary school we attended.

In their new house Margaret had her own room in which we spent the night together. We often lay awake for hours reciting the dialogue for plays that we made up. Sometimes we stayed at my house nights, but I preferred sleeping at Margaret’s because we had more freedom there to do as we pleased. And later, when we were teenagers, I could smoke cigarettes at Margaret’s long before I was permitted to smoke at home.

I was thrilled when her mother asked me to paint a Mexican mural on one of the kitchen walls. I cringe now to think of the quality of that painting. But as I painted the cactus-filled desert with its donkeys and Mexican men in their sombreros, I felt exceedingly proud of my accomplishment. Margaret’s mother liked the mural and left it on the wall until she had the kitchen painted many years later. She always loved my painting and drawing. I was deeply moved when I went to see her after Margaret’s father died and found her lying on her bed holding a pencil portrait I’d drawn of him years before.

Margaret was at home for her father’s funeral. As close as we were as children and teenagers, once we graduated from high school and left Cairo, we rarely—if ever—wrote to each other. Margaret married a soldier and left for Germany with her new husband. I left for college. Neither of us returned to Cairo often, though we usually managed to end up visiting at the same time. And seeing each other, we always began to talk as if continuing our conversation from the day before. Ours was an enduring relationship that required no words to sustain it.

But the afternoon I sat beside her piano while Margaret played “I
Get Along Without You Very Well,” I had no idea that we would be such good friends not only in childhood and adolescence but in old age as well. And I certainly couldn’t have imagined the life that lay before me. It was enough to have Margaret comfort me with music while her mother made my favorite potato salad in the kitchen where we would soon be eating supper.

D
URING MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE AT
F
LORIDA
S
TATE
U
NIVERSITY
in Tallahassee, I had a crush on my housemother, Nina Lawrence, who was retired from serving in the navy. She was a short woman with prominent features, clear blue eyes, and prematurely snow-white hair. I did an oil portrait of her, which gave me an excuse to spend long hours in her apartment, looking at her, being with her. She had a friend, a younger housemother in a nearby dorm, and the three of us often walked downhill from FSU to downtown Tallahassee for dinner. One evening, just before I knocked on Miss Lawrence’s partially opened door, I paused, for the two women were talking about me. Miss Lawrence was saying to her friend that she was concerned that my being with her so often might cause someone on the university staff to think that we were having a lesbian relationship. She actually used the word
lesbian
. But there was nothing hysterical in her tone, just a calm concern. I called her name, knocked, and opened the door all at once. I didn’t want to eavesdrop on her any more than I already unintentionally had. Both women greeted me warmly, and we set off for downtown together.

One night a group of us girls had a couple of drinks and someone reported us to the dean of women. Miss Lawrence didn’t appear
especially upset about it; she knew me well enough to know that I was no serious drinker, but she was concerned about the state of crisis it threw me into. I was upset because the dean would notify my parents, as was customary with any serious infraction of the rules. They’d be told I’d been reported for drinking and that I’d be confined to the campus and would have my dating privileges taken away for two weeks.

My upset must have been evident as I sat across the desk from the dean. “Margaret,” she said in a warm, accepting voice. “Don’t make this larger than it is. You’ve not committed a crime, you’ve broken a college rule.” I was grateful for her support, but she didn’t know my mother and how hysterical she got about anything I did that went against her own rules. I often thought that she’d expressed the same upset when she found out that I’d smoked a cigarette that she would have expressed if I’d told her I was pregnant. And my drinking? To imagine her response made me feel frantic. I asked the dean when she was going to send the letter. I wanted to tell my parents myself before they got it. She assured me that she’d wait for a week before sending it.

Relieved, I went back to the dormitory to begin to think about what I’d write to my parents. “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill,” Miss Lawrence had advised, and invited me and her fellow housemother for dinner in town that night.

For two days I thought of the letter, then finally sat down at my typewriter and wrote it. “Dear Mother and Daddy,” I wrote. “I am very tired of living on the pedestal on which you’ve placed me ever since I was a little girl. It’s very lonely up here.” Then I told them about the night that I had something to drink and how I was now confined to the campus for two weeks. The only male I was permitted to see was my father. I also told them that they would soon be getting a letter from the dean of women telling them this. “All my life,” I continued, “I’ve been searching, longing for unconditional love. I need that unconditional love from you. I need it now. As of
this letter I’ve climbed down from your pedestal. I love you both deeply, but I can no longer live the life you have demanded of me.”

Without taking the letter from my typewriter, I reread it. I felt good about it, but I wanted to let my emotions cool a little before signing and mailing it. I walked to a coffee shop across the street from the campus and had my usual cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich and a Coke. Then I smoked a cigarette before walking back to my room.

The door stood open. Mother was sitting at my desk. She’d taken the letter from the typewriter and was reading it and crying. In all the months I’d been at FSU, Mother had never once come to see me unannounced. My safe place was no longer safe. Here, I’d thought, I could write anything I wanted to write without worrying about Mother reading it and getting upset. Here I could be myself without Mother’s judgment. Now here she was in my room, reading and sobbing.

“I saw that the letter was addressed to me,” she said in an almost apologetic way. “I had some errands in Tallahassee. I’d thought …” Her voice trailed off. Then she sniffled, wiped her nose with a Kleenex from her purse, and dropped it into my wastebasket. “I need to be going now,” she said, then folded the letter and put it into her bag. I followed her out the door and down the stairs.

After a few steps she stopped and turned around. Her eyes were very red, but their glare was so intense that I felt I could almost lose my balance under the impact. I leaned against the wall. “How could you do this to me?” she wailed. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and this is what I get from you. What have I done to deserve this?”

Her chest heaved with sobs. “I will never tell your father. I just don’t think he could bear it. No, he must never know.”

I turned and went to my room, closing the door behind me.

The next communication I received from home was a call from Daddy. He’d been to Atlanta on a shopping trip for the new dry-goods store that he was struggling to make successful. He said he had
some gifts for me. He wanted to take me out to dinner. I knew Mother had told him about my being confined to the campus for drinking, though he said nothing about it.

Our time together was festive. Even though he bought the clothes for me wholesale, I knew he’d spent far more than he could comfortably afford. First there was a beautifully cut black crêpe dress with a white collar exquisitely embroidered with white silk and tiny seed pearls. Then there was a pair of black leather Capezio pumps with wooden stacked heels. Last was a rust-colored suede sports jacket. It was the most extravagant thing he’d ever done for me.

Daddy and I had a wonderfully good time together. I felt an unspoken bond between us. I didn’t want him to drink any more than I myself wanted to drink seriously. I’d seen the destructive effects of drinking firsthand in Uncle Frank. But ever since Mother had told me how she’d kept Daddy from having a beer by threatening to make me, a baby, drink whatever he drank, I’d resented her using me to manipulate him. That night I felt he was celebrating the fact that I had broken one of Mother’s rules, something he’d been unable to do because she’d made the stakes higher than he was willing to pay. I felt that we were co-conspirators. While Mother punitively withdrew from me in silence, Daddy moved closer and accepted my humanity.

My freshman year at FSU was my first and last. Edmund Lewandowski, the painting teacher I’d gone to FSU to study with, accepted the position as head of the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. I wanted to go with him, but Mother had no respect for art schools. She intended for me to have a college education. It didn’t occur to me that I had any right to oppose her. I applied for and got an art scholarship to the University of Georgia.

Miss Lawrence was going to leave FSU also, but before leaving Tallahassee she took me on a vacation with her to Pensacola, then
Saint Augustine, Florida. A week alone with Miss Lawrence: I was in heaven. In Pensacola, she pulled up to a coral-colored motel on the beach and rented a room with twin beds. Sleeping within feet of her and being with her all day and evening was more than I could ever have hoped for. It was a week of burning emotions and blazing sun, of long days on the beach, intense blue and turquoise water, and miles and miles of sand. I don’t remember a single meal. Why would I remember food when there was Miss Lawrence’s company to focus on hour after hour? Once, in Saint Augustine, I walked along a crumbling ruin of a stone wall by the water, and she reached up and took my hand in hers. Feeling her firm grip with my own, I could have walked for miles, my whole body trembling with the thrill of her touch.

After our vacation, Miss Lawrence took me home to Cairo. Then she moved to Saint Augustine. She wrote me notes from time to time. From the University of Georgia I wrote to her that I was seriously involved with a boy and had plans for marriage. She wrote back that she was happy for me. I’ve no memory of hearing from her after that. At some point she moved from Saint Augustine and I lost track of her altogether. In later years, I felt a longing to reunite with her, to tell her how much her love mattered to the love-starved girl I was, but I was never able to locate her.

J
OHN
R
OBISON AND
I
WERE SEATED NEXT TO EACH OTHER, IN ALPHABETICAL
order, in among the two hundred students enrolled in Human Biology 101 at the University of Georgia in Athens. My first response to him was that he looked very young. That, and that he had beautiful hands and fine features. He told me later that he’d thought I had capable-looking hands, that he’d loved watching them as I took notes. He also said that he’d loved my face. The man seated to my left was a short, dark-haired veteran of the Korean War with a wedding band on his finger. The three of us introduced ourselves to one another before class began.

The professor walked up the steps to the platform at the front of the room. He was a short, stocky man with clipped black hair that stood straight up. As he talked, he paced, or rocked back and forth on his heels, and waved his arms wildly, making me think of a frisky Scottie dog. Standing before the blackboard, he told us his name, a long name almost impossible to pronounce. After saying it, he told us that many of his students simply spelled his name this way—turning the piece of chalk sideways in his hands, he wrote in large, wide letters: S.O.B.

Then he began his first lecture.

John and I left the class together, talking about our wild and witty professor. When we came to the parking lot, he asked if he could drive me back to my dorm. He opened the door of his car for me, and I climbed in. On the way to the dorm he invited me to go with him to a local drive-in for a glass of iced tea.

We sat in the car and talked for hours about philosophy and religion. I’d taken an introductory philosophy course my freshman year at FSU and had spent much of that year discussing philosophical issues with other students from the class. While John had taken no philosophy courses, his intention was to be a Presbyterian minister, and many of the philosophical and theological issues that we were interested in were closely related. I liked his quick mind and articulate speech. And I’d never met a boy with whom conversation came so easily.

After that first meeting, both of us broke our prearranged dates for the following weekend, and neither of us ever dated anyone else. What if John had taken out Nancy Larkin with her long blond hair? What if I’d gone out with Tom Watson? Futile questions. The first letter of our last names, and the fact that we were seated next to each other in Human Biology 101, decided the course of both our lives.